Experimentation with MANETs of Smartphones

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively survey existing possibilities to build applications on top of ad-hoc smartphone networks for experimentation purposes, and introduce a taxonomy to classify them. We present AdHocDroid, an Android package that creates an IP-level MANET of (rooted) Android smartphones, and make it publicly available to the community. AdHocDroid supports standard TCP/IP applications, providing real smartphone IEEE 802.11 MANET and the capability to easily change the routing protocol. We tested our framework on several smartphones and a laptop. We validate the MANET running off-the-shelf applications, and reporting on experimental performance evaluation, including network metrics and battery discharge rate.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Towards Optimal Distributed Node Scheduling in a Multihop Wireless Network through Local Voting

In a multihop wireless network, it is crucial but challenging to schedule transmissions in an efficient and fair manner. In this paper, a novel distributed node scheduling algorithm, called Local Voting, is proposed. This algorithm tries to semi-equalize the load (defined as the ratio of the queue length over the number of allocated slots) through slot reallocation based on local information exchange. The algorithm stems from the finding that the shortest delivery time or delay is obtained when the load is semi-equalized throughout the network. In addition, we prove that, with Local Voting, the network system converges asymptotically towards the optimal scheduling. Moreover, through extensive simulations, the performance of Local Voting is further investigated in comparison with several representative scheduling algorithms from the literature. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than the other distributed algorithms in terms of average delay, maximum delay, and fairness. Despite being distributed, the performance of Local Voting is also found to be very close to a centralized algorithm that is deemed to have the optimal performance

Dynamic master selection in wireless networks

Abstract. Mobile wireless networks need to maximize their network lifetime (defined as the time until the first node runs out of energy). In the broadcast network lifetime problem, all nodes are sending broadcast traffic, and one asks for an assignment of transmit powers to nodes, and for sets of relay nodes so that the network lifetime is maximized. The selection of a dynamic relay set consisting of a single node (the ‘master’), can be regarded as a special case, providing lower bounds to the optimal lifetime in the general setting. This paper provides a first analysis of a ‘dynamic master selection’ algorithm

Consistent Sensor, Relay, and Link Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, where energy is scarce, it is inefficient to have all nodes active because they consume a non-negligible amount of battery. In this paper we consider the problem of jointly selecting sensors, relays and links in a wireless sensor network where the active sensors need to communicate their measurements to one or multiple access points. Information messages are routed stochastically in order to capture the inherent reliability of the broadcast links via multiple hops, where the nodes may be acting as sensors or as relays. We aim at finding optimal sparse solutions where both, the consistency between the selected subset of sensors, relays and links, and the graph connectivity in the selected subnetwork are guaranteed. Furthermore, active nodes should ensure a network performance in a parameter estimation scenario. Two problems are studied: sensor and link selection; and sensor, relay and link selection. To solve such problems, we present tractable optimization formulations and propose two algorithms that satisfy the previous network requirements. We also explore an extension scenario: only link selection. Simulation results show the performance of the algorithms and illustrate how they provide a sparse solution, which not only saves energy but also guarantees the network requirements.Comment: 27 pages, 17 figure

Network Lifetime Maximization With Node Admission in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are expected to support multimedia services such as delivery of video and audio streams. However, due to the relatively stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of multimedia services (e.g., high transmission rates and timely delivery) and the limited wireless resources, it is possible that not all the potential sensor nodes can be admitted into the network. Thus, node admission is essential for WMSNs, which is the target of this paper. Specifically, we aim at the node admission and its interaction with power allocation and link scheduling. A cross-layer design is presented as a two-stage optimization problem, where at the first stage the number of admitted sensor nodes is maximized, and at the second stage the network lifetime is maximized. Interestingly, it is proved that the two-stage optimization problem can be converted to a one-stage optimization problem with a more compact and concise mathematical form. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the two-stage and one-stage optimization frameworks