An Upper Bound on Multi-hop Transmission Capacity with Dynamic Routing Selection

This paper develops upper bounds on the end-to-end transmission capacity of multi-hop wireless networks. Potential source-destination paths are dynamically selected from a pool of randomly located relays, from which a closed-form lower bound on the outage probability is derived in terms of the expected number of potential paths. This is in turn used to provide an upper bound on the number of successful transmissions that can occur per unit area, which is known as the transmission capacity. The upper bound results from assuming independence among the potential paths, and can be viewed as the maximum diversity case. A useful aspect of the upper bound is its simple form for an arbitrary-sized network, which allows insights into how the number of hops and other network parameters affect spatial throughput in the non-asymptotic regime. The outage probability analysis is then extended to account for retransmissions with a maximum number of allowed attempts. In contrast to prevailing wisdom, we show that predetermined routing (such as nearest-neighbor) is suboptimal, since more hops are not useful once the network is interference-limited. Our results also make clear that randomness in the location of relay sets and dynamically varying channel states is helpful in obtaining higher aggregate throughput, and that dynamic route selection should be used to exploit path diversity.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 201

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

Multihop Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents a dual method of closed-form analysis and lightweight simulation that enables an evaluation of the performance of mobile ad hoc networks that is more realistic, efficient, and accurate than those found in existing publications. Some features accommodated by the new analysis are shadowing, exclusion and guard zones, and distance-dependent fading. Three routing protocols are examined: least-delay, nearest-neighbor, and maximum-progress routing. The tradeoffs among the path reliabilities, average conditional delays, average conditional number of hops, and area spectral efficiencies are examined.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEEE Military Commun. Conf. (MILCOM), 201

Energy efficient networking via dynamic relay node selection in wireless networks

Mobile wireless ad-hoc 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 preliminary analysis of such a `dynamic master selection' algorithm, comparing relaying to direct routing

Opportunistic Routing in Multihop Wireless Networks: Capacity, Energy Efficiency, and Security

Opportunistic routing (OR) takes advantages of the spatial diversity and broadcast nature of wireless networks to combat the time-varying links by involving multiple neighboring nodes (forwarding candidates) for each packet relay. This dissertation studies the properties, energy efficiency, capacity, throughput, protocol design and security issues about OR in multihop wireless networks. Firstly, we study geographic opportunistic routing (GOR), a variant of OR which makes use of nodes\u27 location information. We identify and prove three important properties of GOR. The first one is on prioritizing the forwarding candidates according to their geographic advancements to the destination. The second one is on choosing the forwarding candidates based on their advancements and link qualities in order to maximize the expected packet advancement (EPA) with different number of forwarding candidates. The third one is on the concavity of the maximum EPA in respect to the number of forwarding candidates. We further propose a local metric, EPA per unit energy consumption, to tradeoff the routing performance and energy efficiency for GOR. Leveraging the proved properties of GOR, we propose two efficient algorithms to select and prioritize forwarding candidates to maximize the local metric. Secondly, capacity is a fundamental issue in multihop wireless networks. We propose a framework to compute the end-to-end throughput bound or capacity of OR in single/multirate systems given OR strategies (candidate selection and prioritization). Taking into account wireless interference and unique properties of OR, we propose a new method of constructing transmission conflict graphs, and we introduce the concept of concurrent transmission sets to allow the proper formulation of the maximum end-to-end throughput problem as a maximum-flow linear programming problem subject to the transmission conflict constraints. We also propose two OR metrics: expected medium time (EMT) and expected advancement rate (EAR), and the corresponding distributed and local rate and candidate set selection schemes, the Least Medium Time OR (LMTOR) and the Multirate Geographic OR (MGOR). We further extend our framework to compute the capacity of OR in multi-radio multi-channel systems with dynamic OR strategies. We study the necessary and sufficient conditions for the schedulability of a traffic demand vector associated with a transmitter to its forwarding candidates in a concurrent transmission set. We further propose an LP approach and a heuristic algorithm to obtain an opportunistic forwarding strategy scheduling that satisfies a traffic demand vector. Our methodology can be used to calculate the end-to-end throughput bound of OR in multi-radio/channel/rate multihop wireless networks, as well as to study the OR behaviors (such as candidate selection and prioritization) under different network configurations. Thirdly, protocol design of OR in a contention-based medium access environment is an important and challenging issue. In order to avoid duplication, we should ensure only the best receiver of each packet to forward it in an efficient way. We investigate the existing candidate coordination schemes and propose a fast slotted acknowledgment (FSA) to further improve the performance of OR by using a single ACK to coordinate the forwarding candidates with the help of the channel sensing technique. Furthermore, we study the throughput of GOR in multi-rate and single-rate systems. We introduce a framework to analyze the one-hop throughput of GOR, and provide a deeper insight on the trade-off between the benefit (packet advancement, bandwidth, and transmission reliability) and cost (medium time delay) associated with the node collaboration. We propose a local metric named expected one-hop throughput (EOT) to balance the benefit and cost. Finally, packet reception ratio (PRR) has been widely used as an indicator of the link quality in multihop wireless networks. Many routing protocols including OR in wireless networks depend on the PRR information to make routing decision. Providing accurate link quality measurement (LQM) is essential to ensure the right operation of these routing protocols. However, the existing LQM mechanisms are subject to malicious attacks, thus can not guarantee to provide correct link quality information. We analyze the security vulnerabilities in the existing link quality measurement (LQM) mechanisms and propose an efficient broadcast-based secure LQM (SLQM) mechanism, which prevents the malicious attackers from reporting a higher PRR than the actual one. We analyze the security strength and the cost of the proposed mechanism