PERFORMANCE STUDY FOR CAPILLARY MACHINE-TO-MACHINE NETWORKS

Communication technologies witness a wide and rapid pervasiveness of wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. It is emerging to apply for data transfer among devices without human intervention. Capillary M2M networks represent a candidate for providing reliable M2M connectivity. In this thesis, we propose a wireless network architecture that aims at supporting a wide range of M2M applications (either real-time or non-real-time) with an acceptable QoS level. The architecture uses capillary gateways to reduce the number of devices communicating directly with a cellular network such as LTE. Moreover, the proposed architecture reduces the traffic load on the cellular network by providing capillary gateways with dual wireless interfaces. One interface is connected to the cellular network, whereas the other is proposed to communicate to the intended destination via a WiFi-based mesh backbone for cost-effectiveness. We study the performance of our proposed architecture with the aid of the ns-2 simulator. An M2M capillary network is simulated in different scenarios by varying multiple factors that affect the system performance. The simulation results measure average packet delay and packet loss to evaluate the quality-of-service (QoS) of the proposed architecture. Our results reveal that the proposed architecture can satisfy the required level of QoS with low traffic load on the cellular network. It also outperforms a cellular-based capillary M2M network and WiFi-based capillary M2M network. This implies a low cost of operation for the service provider while meeting a high-bandwidth service level agreement. In addition, we investigate how the proposed architecture behaves with different factors like the number of capillary gateways, different application traffic rates, the number of backbone routers with different routing protocols, the number of destination servers, and the data rates provided by the LTE and Wi-Fi technologies. Furthermore, the simulation results show that the proposed architecture continues to be reliable in terms of packet delay and packet loss even under a large number of nodes and high application traffic rates

The InterMesh Network Architecture

The rapid spread of mobile devices, the emergence of key wireless technologies, and the nomadic user and computing lifestyles on current networks are continuously evolving in synergy. MANETs, WSNs, and WMNs are examples of self-organizing unstructured networks that have their local communication paradigms and are optimized to perform under their particular physical constraints. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are particularly interesting because of their ability to operate in a pure ad-hoc mode or to include some infrastructural components, making them suitable for a multitude of applications. Inter-networking among the heterogeneous access networks is currently offered by the Internet Protocol (IP). However, the evolution of and the innovation within these networks is greatly hindered by the rigidity of the current Internet implementation and its lag in efficiently supporting flexible unstructured communication paradigms. To broaden the user\u27s innovation space and to efficiently embrace the characteristics of emerging networks, clean-slate architectural approaches are being pursued. In this paper, we propose InterMesh, a novel iner-networking platform for wireless mesh networks. InterMesh enables heterogeneous access networks to converge at novel Persistent Identification and Networking Layer (PINL), providing a seamless service to individual network entities. This paper identifies the key concepts behind the InterMesh network platform, presents an interesting prototype implementation that can coexist with today\u27s Internet while still be able to evolve separately, and discusses some preliminary performance results of the prototype

Design of interface selection protocols for multi-homed wireless networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University on 10 December 2010.The IEEE 802.11/802.16 standards conformant wireless communication stations have multi-homing transmission capability. To achieve greater communication efficiency, multi-homing capable stations use handover mechanism to select appropriate transmission channel according to variations in the channel quality. This thesis presents three internal-linked handover schemes, (1) Interface Selection Protocol (ISP), belonging to Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)- Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) environment (2) Fast Channel Scanning (FCS) and (3) Traffic Manager (TM), (2) and (3) belonging to WiMAX Environment. The proposed schemes in this thesis use a novel mechanism of providing a reliable communication route. This solution is based on a cross-layer communication framework, where the interface selection module uses various network related parameters from Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer/Physical Layer (PHY) across the protocol suite for decision making at the Network layer. The proposed solutions are highly responsive when compared with existing multi-homed schemes; responsiveness is one of the key factors in the design of such protocols. Selected route under these schemes is based on the most up to date link-layer information. Therefore, such a route is not only reliable in terms of route optimization but it also fulfils the application demands in terms of throughput and delay. Design of ISP protocol use probing frames during the route discovery process. The 802.11 mandates the use of different rates for data transmission frames. The ISP-metric can be incorporated into various routing aspects and its applicability is determined by the possibility of provision of MAC dependent parameters that are used to determine the best path metric values. In many cases, higher device density, interference and mobility cause variable medium access delays. It causes creation of ‘unreachable zones’, where destination is marked as unreachable. However, by use of the best path metric, the destination has been made reachable, anytime and anywhere, because of the intelligent use of the probing frames and interface selection algorithm implemented. The IEEE 802.16e introduces several MAC level queues for different access categories, maintaining service requirement within these queues; which imply that frames from a higher priority queue, i.e. video frames, are serviced more frequently than those belonging to lower priority queues. Such an enhancement at the MAC sub-layer introduces uneven queuing delays. Conventional routing protocols are unaware of such MAC specific constraints and as a result, these factors are not considered which result in channel performance degradation. To meet such challenges, the thesis presents FCS and TM schemes for WiMAX. For FCS, Its solution is to improve the mobile WiMAX handover and address the scanning latency. Since minimum scanning time is the most important issue in the handover process. This handover scheme aims to utilize the channel efficiently and apply such a procedure to reduce the time it takes to scan the neighboring access stations. TM uses MAC and physical layer (PHY) specific information in the interface metric and maintains a separate path to destination by applying an alternative interface operation. Simulation tests and comparisons with existing multi-homed protocols and handover schemes demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating the medium dependent parameters. Moreover, show that suggested schemes, have shown better performance in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput, with efficiency up to 40% in specific test scenarios

Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath

The Internet is inherently a multipath network: For an underlying network with only a single path, connecting various nodes would have been debilitatingly fragile. Unfortunately, traditional Internet technologies have been designed around the restrictive assumption of a single working path between a source and a destination. The lack of native multipath support constrains network performance even as the underlying network is richly connected and has redundant multiple paths. Computer networks can exploit the power of multiplicity, through which a diverse collection of paths is resource pooled as a single resource, to unlock the inherent redundancy of the Internet. This opens up a new vista of opportunities, promising increased throughput (through concurrent usage of multiple paths) and increased reliability and fault tolerance (through the use of multiple paths in backup/redundant arrangements). There are many emerging trends in networking that signify that the Internet's future will be multipath, including the use of multipath technology in data center computing; the ready availability of multiple heterogeneous radio interfaces in wireless (such as Wi-Fi and cellular) in wireless devices; ubiquity of mobile devices that are multihomed with heterogeneous access networks; and the development and standardization of multipath transport protocols such as multipath TCP. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature on network-layer multipath solutions. We will present a detailed investigation of two important design issues, namely, the control plane problem of how to compute and select the routes and the data plane problem of how to split the flow on the computed paths. The main contribution of this paper is a systematic articulation of the main design issues in network-layer multipath routing along with a broad-ranging survey of the vast literature on network-layer multipathing. We also highlight open issues and identify directions for future work

Vehicular Inter-Networking via Named Data

In this paper we apply the Named Data Networking, a newly proposed Internet architecture, to networking vehicles on the run. Our initial design, dubbed V-NDN, illustrates NDN's promising potential in providing a unifying architecture that enables networking among all computing devices independent from whether they are connected through wired infrastructure, ad hoc, or intermittent DTN. This paper describes the prototype implementation of V-NDN and its preliminary performance assessment

Access and metro network convergence for flexible end-to-end network design

This paper reports on the architectural, protocol, physical layer, and integrated testbed demonstrations carried out by the DISCUS FP7 consortium in the area of access - metro network convergence. Our architecture modeling results show the vast potential for cost and power savings that node consolidation can bring. The architecture, however, also recognizes the limits of long-reach transmission for low-latency 5G services and proposes ways to address such shortcomings in future projects. The testbed results, which have been conducted end-to-end, across access - metro and core, and have targeted all the layers of the network from the application down to the physical layer, show the practical feasibility of the concepts proposed in the project

ENABLING SMART CITY SERVICES FOR HETEROGENEOUS WIRELESS NETWORKS

A city can be transformed into a smart city if there is a resource-rich and reliable communication infrastructure available. A smart city in effect improves the quality of life of citizens by providing the means to convert the existing solutions to smart ones. Thus, there is a need for finding a suitable network structure that is capable of providing sufficient capacity and satisfactory quality-of-service in terms of latency and reliability. In this thesis, we propose a wireless network structure for smart cities. Our proposed network provides two wireless interfaces for each smart city node. One is supposed to connect to a public WiFi network, while the other is connected to a cellular network (such as LTE). Indeed, Multi-homing helps different applications to use the two interfaces simultaneously as well as providing the necessary redundancy in case the connection of one interface is lost. The performance of our proposed network structure is investigated using comprehensive ns-2 computer simulations. In this study, high data rate real-time and low data rate non-real-time applications are considered. The effect of a wide range of network parameters is tested such as the WiFi transmission rate, LTE transmission rate, the number of real-time and non-real-time nodes, application traffic rate, and different wireless propagation models. We focus on critical quality-of-service (QoS) parameters such as packet delivery delay and packet loss. We also measured the energy consumed in packet transmission. Compared with a single-interface WiFi-based or an LTE-based network, our simulation results show the superiority of the proposed network structure in satisfying QoS with lower latency and lower packet loss. We found also that the proposed multihoming structure enables the smart city sensors and other applications to realize a greener communication by consuming a lesser amount of transmission power rather than single interface-based networks