Energy Efficient Protocols for Delay Tolerant Networks

The delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is characterized by frequent disconnections and long delays of links among devices due to mobility, sparse deployment of devices, attacks, and noise, etc. Considerable research efforts have been devoted recently to DTNs enabling communications between network entities with intermittent connectivity. Unfortunately, mobile devices have limited energy capacity, and the fundamental problem is that traditional power-saving mechanisms are designed assuming well connected networks. Due to much larger inter-contact durations than contact durations, devices spend most of their life time in the neighbor discovery, and centralized power-saving strategies are difficult. Consequently, mobile devices consume a significant amount of energy in the neighbor discovery, rather than in infrequent data transfers. Therefore, distributed energy efficient neighbor discovery protocols for DTNs are essential to minimize the degradation of network connectivity and maximize the benefits from mobility. In this thesis, we develop sleep scheduling protocols in the medium access control (MAC) layer that are adaptive and distributed under different clock synchronization conditions: synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-asynchronous. In addition, we propose a distributed clock synchronization protocol to mitigate the clock synchronization problem in DTNs. Our research accomplishments are briefly outlined as follows: Firstly, we design an adaptive exponential beacon (AEB) protocol. By exploiting the trend of contact availability, beacon periods are independently adjusted by each device and optimized using the distribution of contact durations. The AEB protocol significantly reduces energy consumption while maintaining comparable packet delivery delay and delivery ratio. Secondly, we design two asynchronous clock based sleep scheduling (ACDS) protocols. Based on the fact that global clock synchronization is difficult to achieve in general, predetermined patterns of sleep schedules are constructed using hierarchical arrangements of cyclic difference sets such that devices independently selecting different duty cycle lengths are still guaranteed to have overlapping awake intervals with other devices within the communication range. Thirdly, we design a distributed semi-asynchronous sleep scheduling (DSA) protocol. Although the synchronization error is unavoidable, some level of clock accuracy may be possible for many practical scenarios. The sleep schedules are constructed to guarantee contacts among devices having loosely synchronized clocks, and parameters are optimized using the distribution of synchronization error. We also define conditions for which the proposed semi-asynchronous protocol outperforms existing asynchronous sleep scheduling protocols. Lastly, we design a distributed clock synchronization (DCS) protocol. The proposed protocol considers asynchronous and long delayed connections when exchanging relative clock information among nodes. As a result, smaller synchronization error achieved by the proposed protocol allows more accurate timing information and renders neighbor discovery more energy efficient. The designed protocols improve the lifetime of mobile devices in DTNs by means of energy efficient neighbor discoveries that reduce the energy waste caused by idle listening problems

Socio-economic aware data forwarding in mobile sensing networks and systems

The vision for smart sustainable cities is one whereby urban sensing is core to optimising city operation which in turn improves citizen contentment. Wireless Sensor Networks are envisioned to become pervasive form of data collection and analysis for smart cities but deployment of millions of inter-connected sensors in a city can be cost-prohibitive. Given the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of sensor-rich mobile devices, Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Phones (WSN-MP) provide a highly flexible and ready-made wireless infrastructure for future smart cities. In a WSN-MP, mobile phones not only generate the sensing data but also relay the data using cellular communication or short range opportunistic communication. The largest challenge here is the efficient transmission of potentially huge volumes of sensor data over sometimes meagre or faulty communications networks in a cost-effective way. This thesis investigates distributed data forwarding schemes in three types of WSN-MP: WSN with mobile sinks (WSN-MS), WSN with mobile relays (WSN-HR) and Mobile Phone Sensing Systems (MPSS). For these dynamic WSN-MP, realistic models are established and distributed algorithms are developed for efficient network performance including data routing and forwarding, sensing rate control and and pricing. This thesis also considered realistic urban sensing issues such as economic incentivisation and demonstrates how social network and mobility awareness improves data transmission. Through simulations and real testbed experiments, it is shown that proposed algorithms perform better than state-of-the-art schemes.Open Acces

A cross-layer quality-oriented energy-efficient scheme for multimedia delivery in wireless local area networks

Wireless communication technologies, although emerged only a few decades ago, have grown fast in both popularity and technical maturity. As a result, mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) or smart phones equipped with embedded wireless cards have seen remarkable growth in popularity and are quickly becoming one of the most widely used communication tools. This is mainly determined by the flexibility, convenience and relatively low costs associated with these devices and wireless communications. Multimedia applications have become by far one of the most popular applications among mobile users. However this type of application has very high bandwidth requirements, seriously restricting the usage of portable devices. Moreover, the wireless technology involves increased energy consumption and consequently puts huge pressure on the limited battery capacity which presents many design challenges in the context of battery powered devices. As a consequence, power management has raised awareness in both research and industrial communities and huge efforts have been invested into energy conservation techniques and strategies deployed within different components of the mobile devices. Our research presented in this thesis focuses on energy efficient data transmission in wireless local networks, and mainly contributes in the following aspects: 1. Static STELA, which is a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer solution that adapts the sleep/wakeup state schedule of the radio transceiver according to the bursty nature of data traffic and real time observation of data packets in terms of arrival time. The algorithm involves three phases– slow start phase, exponential increase phase, and linear increase phase. The initiation and termination of each phase is self-adapted to real time traffic and user configuration. It is designed to provide either maximum energy efficiency or best Quality of Service (QoS) according to user preference. 2. Dynamic STELA, which is a MAC layer solution deployed on the mobile devices and provides balanced performance between energy efficiency and QoS. Dynamic STELA consists of the three phase algorithm used in static STELA, and additionally employs a traffic modeling algorithm to analyze historical traffic data and estimate the arrival time of the next burst. Dynamic STELA achieves energy saving through intelligent and adaptive increase of Wireless Network Interface Card (WNIC) sleeping interval in the second and the third phase and at the same time guarantees delivery performance through optimal WNIC waking timing before the estimated arrival of new data burst. 3. Q-PASTE, which is a quality-oriented cross-layer solution with two components employed at different network layers, designed for multimedia content delivery. First component, the Packet/ApplicaTion manager (PAT) is deployed at the application layer of both service gateway and client host. The gateway level PAT utilizes fast start, as a widely supported technique for multimedia content delivery, to achieve high QoS and shapes traffic into bursts to reduce the wireless transceiver’s duty cycle. Additionally, gateway-side PAT informs client host the starting and ending time of fast start to assist parameter tuning. The client-side PAT monitors each active session and informs the MAC layer about their traffic-related behavior. The second component, dynamic STELA, deployed at MAC layer, adaptively adjusts the sleep/wake-up behavior of mobile device wireless interfaces in order to reduce energy consumption while also maintaining high Quality of Service (QoS) levels. 4. A comprehensive survey on energy efficient standards and some of the most important state-of-the-art energy saving technologies is also provided as part of the work

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications

Minimally Invasive Solutions to Challenges Posed by Mobility Changes

Today, things have changed radically. As network technologies have proliferated and evolved, the components of, and participants in, computerized systems have become increasingly decoupled. Users travel and commute while connecting to their office computer or home media server. Hardware devices may be carried by users, move on their own, or reside in data centers, never to be seen or touched by end-users. Even operating systems (OSes) and applications may now migrate across the network while executing, thanks to advances in virtualization that are only just beginning to remake the computing landscape. The decoupling of users, devices, and software has invalidated properties that enabled desired functionality: resulting in compromised function. Power interfaces utilize physi- cal user interactions to determine when transitions between high and lower power states should occur; what happens when users are no longer physically present? Operating system execution often relies on components such as CPU and local disk responding with tightly bounded delays; what should be done when the OS itself is in the process of migrating between two separate physical machines? The fundamental question explored by this dissertation is: Can we find highly adoptable solutions to restore desired functionality that has been lost because of changed mobility characteristics? Our emphasis on adoptability stems from pragmatic concerns: if a solution is difficult to adopt, it is highly unlikely to be used. Consequently, while many potential approaches may involve changes to the network itself, our work focuses on modifying end-point behavior. We show that practical solutions implemented solely in software and deployed only on network endpoints can be developed for a wide problem range. We consider concrete challenges arising from user, device, and software mobility changes, affecting sub-disciplines spanning cloud computing, green computing, and wireless networks. Cloud Computing: Users increasingly utilize virtual machine (VM) technology to migrate and replicate OS and software amongst networked hosts. Traditional execution required one VM image copy on each host's local storage. By transitioning to networked execution, dozens, if not hundreds, of VM replicas may now be distributed from a single networked storage location to a commensurately large set of physical machines. As these systems expand, they have come to be plagued by boot storms (and similar problems) caused when networked access to storage becomes a major bottleneck, drastically delaying VM distribution and execution. Can we develop techniques that resolve this network bottleneck without the need for expensive hardware over-provisioning? Green Computing: Remote access technologies have enabled users to travel while still interacting with computational machinery left in the office or home. Yet, energy savings mechanisms have traditionally relied on the activity of attached peripherals to determine power usage. The shift to remote interaction, which bypasses physically attached peripherals, has effectively broken these energy savings mechanisms. Can we build an economic and practical system that accommodates energy efficiency without compromising the fluid remote interactions users have now come to expect? Wireless Computing: Increasingly advanced mobile devices have provoked a shift towards heavy usage of 3G and 4G bandwidth use. Accordingly, the capacity of infrastructure wireless networks becomes increasingly strained. Can we find a way of supplementing this relatively low-latency infrastructure with high-latency, high-bandwidth opportunistic content exchange? In each scenario, we design a solution that aims to strike the proper balance between adoptability and technical efficiency - producing what we believe are rigorous, practical and adoptable solutions

Mobility Aware Duty Cycling Algorithm (MADCAL) A Dynamic Communication Threshold for Mobile Sink in Wireless Sensor Network

The hotspot issue in wireless sensor networks, with nodes nearest the sink node losing energy fastest and degrading network lifetime, is a well referenced problem. Mobile sink nodes have been proposed as a solution to this. This does not completely remove the hotspot problem though, with nodes the sink passes most closely still expending more energy than others. This study proposes a lightweight algorithm, located in the MAC layer of static nodes and utilising knowledge of predictable sink node mobility. This in order to create a dynamic communication threshold between static nodes and the sink, within which static nodes awaken. Lessening competition for sink communication between nodes. In utilising predictable mobility and factors already known to the static node, such as location and interference range, there is no need for energy consuming messaging. Analysis and simulation results, tested on a lightweight implementation of a carrier-sense multiple access based MAC protocol, shows a significant improvement in energy consumption in both controlled and random environments. With frame delivery improved to the point where sink speed is negated. This when compared to the existing duty cycling approach

Cherub: A hardware distributed single shared address space memory architecture

Increased computer throughput can be achieved through the use of parallel processing. The granularity of a parallel program is the average number of instructions performed by the tasks constituting it. Coarse-grained programs typically execute huge numbers of instructions per task (w 105). The tasks in fine-grained programs are typically short (æ 103). In general, the finer the program grain, the greater the potential for exploiting parallelism. Amdahl’s Law shows that in the absence of overheads, the more potential parallelism that is realised in an algorithm, the faster it will be. The economical granularity of tasks is determined by the intertask communications overhead. Break-even occurs when processing is approximately equally divided between useful work and overhead. The two common parallel programming paradigms are shared variable and message passing. Shared variable is, in general, the more natural of the two as it allows implicit communication between tasks. This encourages the programmer to make use of fine-grained tasks. The message passing paradigm requires explicit communication between tasks. This encourages the programmer to use coarser-grained tasks. Two kinds of parallel architecture have become established. The first is the multiprocessor, which is built around a shared bus giving broadcast communications and a shared memory. This is characterised by low communications overhead, but limited scalability. The second is the multicomputer, which is based on point-to-point communications with larger communications overhead, but good scalability. Quantitatively, the low overhead of the multiprocessor is well matched to fine-grain tasks and, hence, to supporting the shared variable paradigm, while the high overhead of the multicomputer matches it to coarse-grain parallelism and, hence, to the message passing paradigm. Currently, there appears to be no middle ground in parallel computing; an architecture which can support both several hundred medium-grained (« 104 instructions) parallel tasks and the shared variable programming paradigm would be advantageous in many applications. This thesis asserts that it is possible to implement a new computer architecture, Cherub, which has at least 200 processors and is able to support shared variable programming with an optimal task granularity of around 104 instructions. This can be achieved through the combination of a hardware-based distributed shared single address space and a wafer-scale communications network. To support the thesis, the dissertation first specifies a programmer’s interface to Cherub which is simple enough to implement in hardware. It then designs algorithms which provide this interface, allowing the requirements of the underlying network to be estimated. Finally, a wafer scale communications network is outlined, and simulations are used to demonstrate that it can provide the performance required to successfully implement Cherub

Sophisticated Batteryless Sensing

Wireless embedded sensing systems have revolutionized scientific, industrial, and consumer applications. Sensors have become a fixture in our daily lives, as well as the scientific and industrial communities by allowing continuous monitoring of people, wildlife, plants, buildings, roads and highways, pipelines, and countless other objects. Recently a new vision for sensing has emerged---known as the Internet-of-Things (IoT)---where trillions of devices invisibly sense, coordinate, and communicate to support our life and well being. However, the sheer scale of the IoT has presented serious problems for current sensing technologies---mainly, the unsustainable maintenance, ecological, and economic costs of recycling or disposing of trillions of batteries. This energy storage bottleneck has prevented massive deployments of tiny sensing devices at the edge of the IoT. This dissertation explores an alternative---leave the batteries behind, and harvest the energy required for sensing tasks from the environment the device is embedded in. These sensors can be made cheaper, smaller, and will last decades longer than their battery powered counterparts, making them a perfect fit for the requirements of the IoT. These sensors can be deployed where battery powered sensors cannot---embedded in concrete, shot into space, or even implanted in animals and people. However, these batteryless sensors may lose power at any point, with no warning, for unpredictable lengths of time. Programming, profiling, debugging, and building applications with these devices pose significant challenges. First, batteryless devices operate in unpredictable environments, where voltages vary and power failures can occur at any time---often devices are in failure for hours. Second, a device\u27s behavior effects the amount of energy they can harvest---meaning small changes in tasks can drastically change harvester efficiency. Third, the programming interfaces of batteryless devices are ill-defined and non- intuitive; most developers have trouble anticipating the problems inherent with an intermittent power supply. Finally, the lack of community, and a standard usable hardware platform have reduced the resources and prototyping ability of the developer. In this dissertation we present solutions to these challenges in the form of a tool for repeatable and realistic experimentation called Ekho, a reconfigurable hardware platform named Flicker, and a language and runtime for timely execution of intermittent programs called Mayfly