Fuzzy based load and energy aware multipath routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Routing is a challenging task in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) due to their dynamic topology and lack of central administration. As a consequence of un-predictable topology changes of such networks, routing protocols employed need to accurately capture the delay, load, available bandwidth and residual node energy at various locations of the network for effective energy and load balancing. This paper presents a fuzzy logic based scheme that ensures delay, load and energy aware routing to avoid congestion and minimise end-to-end delay in MANETs. In the proposed approach, forwarding delay, average load, available bandwidth and residual battery energy at a mobile node are given as inputs to a fuzzy inference engine to determine the traffic distribution possibility from that node based on the given fuzzy rules. Based on the output from the fuzzy system, traffic is distributed over fail-safe multiple routes to reduce the load at a congested node. Through simulation results, we show that our approach reduces end-to-end delay, packet drop and average energy consumption and increases packet delivery ratio for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic when compared with the popular Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol

A Remote Capacity Utilization Estimator for WLANs

In WLANs, the capacity of a node is not fixed and can vary dramatically due to the shared nature of the medium under the IEEE 802.11 MAC mechanism. There are two main methods of capacity estimation in WLANs: Active methods based upon probing packets that consume the bandwidth of the channel and do not scale well. Passive methods based upon analyzing the transmitted packets that avoid the overhead of transmitting probe packets and perform with greater accuracy. Furthermore, passive methods can be implemented locally or remotely. Local passive methods require an additional dissemination mechanism in order to communicate the capacity information to other network nodes which adds complexity and can be unreliable under adverse network conditions. On the other hand, remote passive methods do not require a dissemination mechanism and so can be simpler to implement and also do not suffer from communication reliability issues. Many applications (e.g. ANDSF etc) can benefit from utilizing this capacity information. Therefore, in this thesis we propose a new remote passive Capacity Utilization estimator performed by neighbour nodes. However, there will be an error associated with the measurements owing to the differences in the wireless medium as observed by the different nodes’ location. The main undertaking of this thesis is to address this issue. An error model is developed to analyse the main sources of error and to determine their impact on the accuracy of the estimator. Arising from this model, a number of modifications are implemented to improve the accuracy of the estimator. The network simulator ns2 is used to investigate the performance of the estimator and the results from a range of different test scenarios indicate its feasibility and accuracy as a passive remote method. Finally, the estimator is deployed in a node saturation detection scheme where it is shown to outperform two other similar schemes based upon queue observation and probing with ping packets

Multipath routing and QoS provisioning in mobile ad hoc networks

PhDA Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that can communicate with each other using multihop wireless links without utilizing any fixed based-station infrastructure and centralized management. Each mobile node in the network acts as both a host generating flows or being destination of flows and a router forwarding flows directed to other nodes. Future applications of MANETs are expected to be based on all-IP architecture and be capable of carrying multitude real-time multimedia applications such as voice and video as well as data. It is very necessary for MANETs to have an efficient routing and quality of service (QoS) mechanism to support diverse applications. This thesis proposes an on-demand Node-Disjoint Multipath Routing protocol (NDMR) with low broadcast redundancy. Multipath routing allows the establishment of multiple paths between a single source and single destination node. It is also beneficial to avoid traffic congestion and frequent link breaks in communication because of the mobility of nodes. The important components of the protocol, such as path accumulation, decreasing routing overhead and selecting node-disjoint paths, are explained. Because the new protocol significantly reduces the total number of Route Request packets, this results in an increased delivery ratio, smaller end-to-end delays for data packets, lower control overhead and fewer collisions of packets. Although NDMR provides node-disjoint multipath routing with low route overhead in MANETs, it is only a best-effort routing approach, which is not enough to support QoS. DiffServ is a standard approach for a more scalable way to achieve QoS in any IP network and could potentially be used to provide QoS in MANETs because it minimises the need for signalling. However, one of the biggest drawbacks of DiffServ is that the QoS provisioning is separate from the routing process. This thesis presents a Multipath QoS Routing protocol for iv supporting DiffServ (MQRD), which combines the advantages of NDMR and DiffServ. The protocol can classify network traffic into different priority levels and apply priority scheduling and queuing management mechanisms to obtain QoS guarantees

Network-Layer Resource Allocation for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This thesis contributes toward the design of a quality-of-service (QoS) aware network layer for wireless ad hoc networks. With the lack of an infrastructure in ad hoc networks, the role of the network layer is not only to perform multihop routing between a source node and a destination node, but also to establish an end-to-end connection between communicating peers that satisfies the service level requirements of multimedia applications running on those peers. Wireless ad hoc networks represent autonomous distributed systems that are infrastructure-less, fully distributed, and multi-hop in nature. Over the last few years, wireless ad hoc networks have attracted significant attention from researchers. This has been fueled by recent technological advances in the development of multifunction and low-cost wireless communication gadgets. Wireless ad hoc networks have diverse applications spanning several domains, including military, commercial, medical, and home networks. Projections indicate that these self-organizing wireless ad hoc networks will eventually become the dominant form of the architecture of telecommunications networks in the near future. Recently, due to increasing popularity of multimedia applications, QoS support in wireless ad hoc networks has become an important yet challenging objective. The challenge lies in the need to support the heterogeneous QoS requirements (e.g., data rate, packet loss probability, and delay constraints) for multimedia applications and, at the same time, to achieve efficient radio resource utilization, taking into account user mobility and dynamics of multimedia traffic. In terms of research contributions, we first present a position-based QoS routing framework for wireless ad-hoc networks. The scheme provides QoS guarantee in terms of packet loss ratio and average end-to-end delay (or throughput) to ad hoc networks loaded with constant rate traffic. Via cross-layer design, we apply call admission control and temporary bandwidth reservation on discovered routes, taking into consideration the physical layer multi-rate capability and the medium access control (MAC) interactions such as simultaneous transmission and self interference from route members. Next, we address the network-layer resource allocation where a single-hop ad hoc network is loaded with random traffic. As a starting point, we study the behavior of the service process of the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC when the network is under different traffic load conditions. Our study investigates the near-memoryless behavior of the service time for IEEE 802.11 saturated single-hop ad hoc networks. We show that the number of packets successfully transmitted by any node over a time interval follows a general distribution, which is close to a Poisson distribution with an upper bounded distribution distance. We also show that the service time distribution can be approximated by the geometric distribution and illustrate that a simplified queuing system can be used efficiently as a resource allocation tool for single hop IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks near saturation. After that, we shift our focus to providing probabilistic packet delay guarantee to multimedia users in non-saturated IEEE 802.11 single hop ad hoc networks. We propose a novel stochastic link-layer channel model to characterize the variations of the IEEE 802.11 channel service process. We use the model to calculate the effective capacity of the IEEE 802.11 channel. The channel effective capacity concept is the dual of the effective bandwidth theory. Our approach offers a tool for distributed statistical resource allocation in single hop ad hoc networks, which combines both efficient resource utilization and QoS provisioning to a certain probabilistic limit. Finally, we propose a statistical QoS routing scheme for multihop IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks. Unlike most of QoS routing schemes in literature, the proposed scheme provides stochastic end-to-end delay guarantee, instead of average delay guarantee, to delay-sensitive bursty traffic sources. Via a cross-layer design approach, the scheme selects the routes based on a geographical on-demand ad hoc routing protocol and checks the availability of network resources by using traffic source and link-layer channel models, incorporating the IEEE 802.11 characteristics and interaction. Our scheme extends the well developed effective bandwidth theory and its dual effective capacity concept to multihop IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks in order to achieve an efficient utilization of the shared radio channel while satisfying the end-to-end delay bound

End-to-End Delay Distribution Analysis for Stochastic Admission Control in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

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