The world's colonization and trade routes formation as imitated by slime mould

The plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is renowned for spanning sources of nutrients with networks of protoplasmic tubes. The networks transport nutrients and metabolites across the plasmodium's body. To imitate a hypothetical colonization of the world and the formation of major transportation routes we cut continents from agar plates arranged in Petri dishes or on the surface of a three-dimensional globe, represent positions of selected metropolitan areas with oat flakes and inoculate the plasmodium in one of the metropolitan areas. The plasmodium propagates towards the sources of nutrients, spans them with its network of protoplasmic tubes and even crosses bare substrate between the continents. From the laboratory experiments we derive weighted Physarum graphs, analyze their structure, compare them with the basic proximity graphs and generalized graphs derived from the Silk Road and the Asia Highway networks. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company

An Analysis Framework for Mobility Metrics in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have inherently dynamic topologies. Under these difficult circumstances, it is essential to have some dependable way of determining the reliability of communication paths. Mobility metrics are well suited to this purpose. Several mobility metrics have been proposed in the literature, including link persistence, link duration, link availability, link residual time, and their path equivalents. However, no method has been provided for their exact calculation. Instead, only statistical approximations have been given. In this paper, exact expressions are derived for each of the aforementioned metrics, applicable to both links and paths. We further show relationships between the different metrics, where they exist. Such exact expressions constitute precise mathematical relationships between network connectivity and node mobility. These expressions can, therefore, be employed in a number of ways to improve performance of MANETs such as in the development of efficient algorithms for routing, in route caching, proactive routing, and clustering schemes

Connectivity, Coverage and Placement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless communication between sensors allows the formation of flexible sensor networks, which can be deployed rapidly over wide or inaccessible areas. However, the need to gather data from all sensors in the network imposes constraints on the distances between sensors. This survey describes the state of the art in techniques for determining the minimum density and optimal locations of relay nodes and ordinary sensors to ensure connectivity, subject to various degrees of uncertainty in the locations of the nodes

Simulations of the Impact of Controlled Mobility for Routing Protocols

This paper addresses mobility control routing in wireless networks. Given a data flow request between a source-destination pair, the problem is to move nodes towards the best placement, such that the performance of the network is improved. Our purpose is to find the best nodes selection depending on the minimization of the maximum distance that nodes have to travel to reach their final position. We propose a routing protocol, the Routing Protocol based on Controlled Mobility (RPCM), where the chosen nodes' path minimizes the total travelled distance to reach desirable position. Specifically, controlled mobility is intended as a new design dimension network allowing to drive nodes to specific best position in order to achieve some common objectives. The main aim of this paper is to show by simulation the effectiveness of controlled mobility when it is used as a new design dimension in wireless networks. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed routing algorithm. Results show how our protocol outperforms a well-known routing protocol, the Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector routing (AODV), in terms of throughput, average end-to-end data packet delay and energy spent to send a packet unit

Implementation of Compressed Sensing in Telecardiology Sensor Networks

Mobile solutions for patient cardiac monitoring are viewed with growing interest, and improvements on current implementations are frequently reported, with wireless, and in particular, wearable devices promising to achieve ubiquity. However, due to unavoidable power consumption limitations, the amount of data acquired, processed, and transmitted needs to be diminished, which is counterproductive, regarding the quality of the information produced. Compressed sensing implementation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) promises to bring gains not only in power savings to the devices, but also with minor impact in signal quality. Several cardiac signals have a sparse representation in some wavelet transformations. The compressed sensing paradigm states that signals can be recovered from a few projections into another basis, incoherent with the first. This paper evaluates the compressed sensing paradigm impact in a cardiac monitoring WSN, discussing the implications in data reliability, energy management, and the improvements accomplished by in-network processing

BRuIT : Bandwidth Reservation under Interferences Influence

This paper deals with the bandwidth reservation problem in ad hoc networks and with the influence that interferences between signals have on this problem. We show that interferences could decrease the applications rates. This can be a real problem for applications that need guarantees. We propose a distributed protocol (called BRuIT) for bandwidth reservation in ad hoc networks that takes into account the existence of interferences from far transmissions. The protocol is analyzed through simulations carried out under NS: we evaluate the signaling overhead required for maintaining the knowledge of existing interferences ; we show that this knowledge reduces delays in case of congestion ; we measure the time for rebuilding broken routes ; and finally we show that this protocol maintains the rate of accepted applications.Cet article traite du problème de réservation de bande passante dans les réseaux ad-hoc et de l’influence des interférences hertziennes sur ce problème. Nous montrons que le phénomène d’interférences peut être à l’origine de pertes de bande passante qui peuvent être problématique pour les applications nécessitant des garanties. nous proposons un protocole distribué de réservation de bande passante pour réseaux ad-hoc appelé BRuIT. Ce protocole prend en compte l’existence d’interférences entre transmissions lointaines. Les performances de BRuIT sont analysées au moyen de simulations sous NS

Coverage-Guaranteed Sensor Node Deployment Strategies for Wireless Sensor Networks

Deployment quality and cost are two conflicting aspects in wireless sensor networks. Random deployment, where the monitored field is covered by randomly and uniformly deployed sensor nodes, is an appropriate approach for large-scale network applications. However, their successful applications depend considerably on the deployment quality that uses the minimum number of sensors to achieve a desired coverage. Currently, the number of sensors required to meet the desired coverage is based on asymptotic analysis, which cannot meet deployment quality due to coverage overestimation in real applications. In this paper, we first investigate the coverage overestimation and address the challenge of designing coverage-guaranteed deployment strategies. To overcome this problem, we propose two deployment strategies, namely, the Expected-area Coverage Deployment (ECD) and BOundary Assistant Deployment (BOAD). The deployment quality of the two strategies is analyzed mathematically. Under the analysis, a lower bound on the number of deployed sensor nodes is given to satisfy the desired deployment quality. We justify the correctness of our analysis through rigorous proof, and validate the effectiveness of the two strategies through extensive simulation experiments. The simulation results show that both strategies alleviate the coverage overestimation significantly. In addition, we also evaluate two proposed strategies in the context of target detection application. The comparison results demonstrate that if the target appears at the boundary of monitored region in a given random deployment, the average intrusion distance of BOAD is considerably shorter than that of ECD with the same desired deployment quality. In contrast, ECD has better performance in terms of the average intrusion distance when the invasion of intruder is from the inside of monitored region

A Feasibility Check for Geographical Cluster Based Routing under Inaccurate Node Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Localized geographic single path routing along a wireless network graph requires exact location information about the network nodes to assure message delivery guarantees. Node localization in practice however is not exact. Errors ranging from several centimeters up to several meters are usual. How to perform localized routing in practice when such errors are prevalent? In this work we look at a promising routing variant which does not completely overcome this practical problem but which mitigates it. The concept does away with trying to find node positions as precise as possible but allows inaccuracies from the very beginning. It partitions the plane by a regular mesh of hexagons. The only information which is of interest is in which cell of that partitioning a node is located in. Using this node embedding, a virtual geographic overlay graph can then be constructed. To find the node positions we apply three variants of multidimensional scaling, two of them being a node localization approach which has been well studied in the context of sensor networks and one which we apply here for the first time in that context. Using the location information we get from these localization approaches we embed the nodes into the clusters their location falls into. We define two graph metrics to assess the quality of the overlay graph obtained by the embedding. Applying these two metrics in a simulation study, we show that cluster based routing is an eligible approach to support localized geographic routing when location errors are prevalent