Performance Optimization of Network Protocols for IEEE 802.11s-based Smart Grid Communications

The transformation of the legacy electric grid to Smart Grid (SG) poses numerous challenges in the design and development of an efficient SG communications network. While there has been an increasing interest in identifying the SG communications network and possible SG applications, specific research challenges at the network protocol have not been elaborated yet. This dissertation revisited each layer of a TCP/IP protocol stack which basically was designed for a wired network and optimized their performance in IEEE 802.11s-based Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) communications network against the following challenges: security and privacy, AMI data explosion, periodic simultaneous data reporting scheduling, poor Transport Control Protocol (TCP) performance, Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) broadcast, and network interoperability. To address these challenges, layered and/or cross-layered protocol improvements were proposed for each layer of TCP/IP protocol stack. At the application layer, a tree-based periodic time schedule and a time division multiple access-based scheduling were proposed to reduce high contention when smart meters simultaneously send their reading. Homomorphic encryption performance was investigated to handle AMI data explosion while providing security and privacy. At the transport layer, a tree-based fixed Retransmission Timeout (RTO) setting and a path-error aware RTO that exploits rich information of IEEE 802.11s data-link layer path selection were proposed to address higher delay due to TCP mechanisms. At the network layer, ARP requests create broadcast storm problems in IEEE 802.11s due to the use of MAC addresses for routing. A secure piggybacking-based ARP was proposed to eliminate this issue. The tunneling mechanisms in the LTE network cause a downlink traffic problem to IEEE 802.11s. For the network interoperability, at the network layer of EPC network, a novel UE access list was proposed to address this issue. At the data-link layer, to handle QoS mismatch between IEEE 802.11s and LTE network, Dual Queues approach was proposed for the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access. The effectiveness of all proposed approaches was validated through extensive simulation experiments using a network simulator. The simulation results showed that the proposed approaches outperformed the traditional TCP/IP protocols in terms of end to end delay, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and collection time

Contributions to the routing of traffic flows in multi-hop IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

The IEEE 802.11 standard was not initially designed to provide multi-hop capabilities. Therefore, providing a proper traffic performance in Multi-Hop IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks (MIWNs) becomes a significant challenge. The approach followed in this thesis has been focused on the routing layer in order to obtain applicable solutions not dependent on a specific hardware or driver. Nevertheless, as is the case of most of the research on this field, a cross-layer design has been adopted. Therefore, one of the first tasks of this work was devoted to the study of the phenomena which affect the performance of the flows in MIWNs. Different estimation methodologies and models are presented and analyzed. The first main contribution of this thesis is related to route creation procedures. First, FB-AODV is introduced, which creates routes and forwards packets according to the flows on the contrary to basic AODV which is destination-based. This enhancement permits to balance the load through the network and gives a finer granularity in the control and monitoring of the flows. Results showed that it clearly benefits the performance of the flows. Secondly, a novel routing metric called Weighted Contention and Interference routing Metric (WCIM) is presented. In all analyzed scenarios, WCIM outperformed the other analyzed state-of-the-art routing metrics due to a proper leveraging of the number of hops, the link quality and the suffered contention and interference. The second main contribution of this thesis is focused on route maintenance. Generally, route recovery procedures are devoted to the detection of link breaks due to mobility or fading. However, other phenomena like the arrival of new flows can degrade the performance of active flows. DEMON, which is designed as an enhancement of FB-AODV, allows the preemptive recovery of degraded routes by passively monitoring the performance of active flows. Results showed that DEMON obtains similar or better results than other published solutions in mobile scenarios, while it clearly outperforms the performance of default AODV under congestion Finally, the last chapter of this thesis deals with channel assignment in multi-radio solutions. The main challenge of this research area relies on the circular relationship between channel assignment and routing; channel assignment determines the routes that can be created, while the created routes decide the real channel diversity of the network and the level of interference between the links. Therefore, proposals which join routing and channel assignment are generally complex, centralized and based on traffic patterns, limiting their practical implementation. On the contrary, the mechanisms presented in this thesis are distributed and readily applicable. First, the Interference-based Dynamic Channel Assignment (IDCA) algorithm is introduced. IDCA is a distributed and dynamic channel assignment based on the interference caused by active flows which uses a common channel in order to assure connectivity. In general, IDCA leads to an interesting trade-off between connectivity preservation and channel diversity. Secondly, MR-DEMON is introduced as way of joining channel assignment and route maintenance. As DEMON, MR-DEMON monitors the performance of the active flows traversing the links, but, instead of alerting the source when noticing degradation, it permits reallocating the flows to less interfered channels. Joining route recovery instead of route creation simplifies its application, since traffic patterns are not needed and channel reassignments can be locally decided. The evaluation of MR-DEMON proved that it clearly benefits the performance of IDCA. Also, it improves DEMON functionality by decreasing the number of route recoveries from the source, leading to a lower overhead.El estándar IEEE 802.11 no fue diseñado inicialmente para soportar capacidades multi-salto. Debido a ello, proveer unas prestaciones adecuadas a los flujos de tráfico que atraviesan redes inalámbricas multi-salto IEEE 802.11 supone un reto significativo. La investigación desarrollada en esta tesis se ha centrado en la capa de encaminamiento con el objetivo de obtener soluciones aplicables y no dependientes de un hardware específico. Sin embargo, debido al gran impacto de fenómenos y parámetros relacionados con las capas físicas y de acceso al medio sobre las prestaciones de los tráficos de datos, se han adoptado soluciones de tipo cross-layer. Es por ello que las primeras tareas de la investigación, presentadas en los capítulos iniciales, se dedicaron al estudio y caracterización de estos fenómenos. La primera contribución principal de esta tesis se centra en mecanismos relacionados con la creación de las rutas. Primero, se introduce una mejora del protocolo AODV, que permite crear rutas y encaminar paquetes en base a los flujos de datos, en lugar de en base a los destinos como se da en el caso básico. Esto permite balacear la carga de la red y otorga un mayor control sobre los flujos activos y sus prestaciones, mejorando el rendimiento general de la red. Seguidamente, se presenta una métrica de encaminamiento sensible a la interferencia de la red y la calidad de los enlaces. Los resultados analizados, basados en la simulación de diferentes escenarios, demuestran que mejora significativamente las prestaciones de otras métricas del estado del arte. La segunda contribución está relacionada con el mantenimiento de las rutas activas. Generalmente, los mecanismos de mantenimiento se centran principalmente en la detección de enlaces rotos debido a la movilidad de los nodos o a la propagación inalámbrica. Sin embargo, otros fenómenos como la interferencia y congestión provocada por la llegada de nuevos flujos pueden degradar de forma significativa las prestaciones de los tráficos activos. En base a ello, se diseña un mecanismo de mantenimiento preventivo de rutas, que monitoriza las prestaciones de los flujos activos y permite su reencaminamiento en caso de detectar rutas degradadas. La evaluación de esta solución muestra una mejora significativa sobre el mantenimiento de rutas básico en escenarios congestionados, mientras que en escenarios con nodos móviles obtiene resultados similares o puntualmente mejores que otros mecanismos preventivos diseñados específicamente para casos con movilidad. Finalmente, el último capítulo de la tesis se centra en la asignación de canales en entornos multi-canal y multi-radio con el objetivo de minimizar la interferencia entre flujos activos. El reto principal en este campo es la dependencia circular que se da entre la asignación de canales y la creación de rutas: la asignación de canales determina los enlaces existentes la red y por ello las rutas que se podrán crear, pero son finalmente las rutas y los tráficos activos quienes determinan el nivel real de interferencia que se dará en la red. Es por ello que las soluciones que proponen unificar la asignación de canales y el encaminamiento de tráficos son generalmente complejas, centralizadas y basadas en patrones de tráfico, lo que limita su implementación en entornos reales. En cambio, en nuestro caso adoptamos una solución distribuida y con mayor aplicabilidad. Primero, se define un algoritmo de selección de canales dinámico basado en la interferencia de los flujos activos, que utiliza un canal común en todos los nodos para asegurar la conectividad de la red. A continuación, se introduce un mecanismo que unifica la asignación de canales con el mantenimiento preventivo de las rutas, permitiendo reasignar flujos degradados a otros canales disponibles en lugar de reencaminarlos completamente. Ambas soluciones demuestran ser beneficiosas en este tipo de entornos.Postprint (published version

Improving the Performance of Wireless LANs

This book quantifies the key factors of WLAN performance and describes methods for improvement. It provides theoretical background and empirical results for the optimum planning and deployment of indoor WLAN systems, explaining the fundamentals while supplying guidelines for design, modeling, and performance evaluation. It discusses environmental effects on WLAN systems, protocol redesign for routing and MAC, and traffic distribution; examines emerging and future network technologies; and includes radio propagation and site measurements, simulations for various network design scenarios, numerous illustrations, practical examples, and learning aids

Cooperative Medium Access Mechanisms and Service-oriented Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Doktorgradsavhandling i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi, Universitetet i Agder, Grimstad, 2011Multi-hop wireless networks have been regarded as a promising path towards future wireless communication landscape. In the past decade, most related work has been performed in the context of mobile ad hoc networks. In very recent years, however, much effort has been shifted to more static networks such as wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks. While significant progress has been achieved through these years, both theoretically and experimentally, challenges still exist in various aspects of these networks. For instance, how to use multi-hop networks as a means for providing broadband Internet services with reliability and balanced load remains as a challenging task. As the number of end-users is increasing rapidly and more and more users are enjoying multimedia services, how to provide Quality of Service (QoS) with user satisfaction in such networks remains also as a hot topic. Meanwhile, another direction which has recently attracted lots of efforts in the international research community is the introduction of cooperative communications. Cooperative communications based on relaying nodes are capable of improving network performance in terms of increased spectral and power efficiency, extended network coverage, balanced QoS, infrastructure-less deployment, etc. Cooperation may happen at different communication layers, at the physical layer where the received signal is retransmitted and at the MAC and routing layers where a packet is forwarded to the next hop in a coordinated manner towards the destination, respectively. However, without joint consideration and design of physical layer, MAC layer and network layer, the benefit of cooperative communication cannot be exploited to the maximum extent. In addition, how to extend one-hop cooperative communication into multi-hop wireless network scenarios remains as an almost un-chartered research frontier. In this dissertation, we enhance the state of the art technologies in the field of multi-hop wireless networks from a layered perspective. While efficient scheduling mechanisms are proposed at the MAC layer, elaborate routing protocols are devised at the network layer. More specifically, by taking into account of cross layer design we cope with network congestion problems in wireless mesh networks mainly at the network layer. In order to further improve the performance of cooperative wireless networks, we propose a contention-based cooperative MAC protocol in the presence of multiple relay nodes. Since a large majority of existing cooperative MAC protocols are designed based on widely-used IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol which exhibits inherent design constraint when applied in multi-hop wireless networks, it is imperative to develop a novel cooperative MAC protocol which is appropriate for multi-hop network scenarios. Next, we propose a TDMA-based MAC protocol supporting cooperative communications in static multi-hop wireless networks. Furthermore, a cooperative lifetime maximization MAC protocol is proposed to cope with the energy hole problem in wireless sensor networks