A novel Ferry Assisted Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing Protocol (FA-GPSR) for Ad-hoc networks in remote locations

Network functionalities play a major role in the connectivity and routing in an Ad-hoc networks because end user devices must contribute in routing and therefore maintain connectivity. In dynamic environments with mobile nodes, routing becomes very challenging; this challenge becomes even more burdensome if a network is deployed in larger areas. Therefore, in order to avoid centralisation and bottlenecks, routing algorithms in Ad-hoc networks should not depend on any specific node. Furthermore, these algorithms should be able to support routing in sparse topologies when the density of the nodes is very low in a large deployment area. The rationale behind this research project stems from the lack of sufficiently effective solutions for wireless networks deployed in large areas where the node's mobility creates what is called the Loosely Coupled Nodes Problem. Therefore, this gap in knowledge needs to be addressed by developing a novel and scalable routing protocol, which can utilise application characteristics to stabilise routing between loosely coupled nodes in a large deployment area. This research proposes a new routing protocol to address this gap by increasing the number of packets delivered to their final destinations in an Ad-hoc networks. As another gap, very few current approaches deal with realistic situations, based on real-life case scenarios, in order to evaluate and enhance the accuracy of their Ad-hoc network protocols, and thus they cannot accurately approximate common real world environments [1]. Therefore, this project addresses research issues directly linked to evaluation of protocols and architectures in use cases and applications in real life scenarios. The novel routing algorithm, Ferry-Assisted Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (FA-GPSR), proposed in this thesis demonstrates the benefits of extracting information from the application to support communication between the nodes in the network topology. In addition, this approach highlights the advantages and disadvantages of the efficiency and reliability of communication in open large areas of deployment. A simulation model of the proposed algorithm has been implemented and its features investigated through simulation runs. The communication between nodes in the topology show that FA-GPSR outperforms the other routings in terms of packet delivery ratio, especially in sparse networks, where the density of nodes is low. The mobility of the destination nodes affected the packets delivery ratio by decreasing the ratio, compared to other cases because of the changes in the location and node velocity. By increasing the number of packets and source nodes, FA-GPSR outperformed the other algorithms because of the efficient use of the patrol node (ferry). Thus, the comparison of FA-GPSR to these algorithms supports the conclusion that FA-GPSR is suitable for use in large open areas with the effect of node density and packet load

Challenges and Solutions for Location-based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks with Complex Network Topology

Complex Network Topologies (CNTs)–network holes and cuts–often occur in practical WSN deployments. Many researchers have acknowledged that CNTs adversely affect the performance of location-based routing and proposed various CNT- aware location-based routing protocols. However, although they aim to address practical issues caused by CNTs, many proposed protocols are either based on idealistic assumptions, require too much resources, or have poor performance. Additionally, proposed protocols are designed only for a single routing primitive–either unicast, multicast, or convergecast. However, as recent WSN applications require diverse traffic patterns, the need for an unified routing framework has ever increased. In this dissertation, we address these main weaknesses in the research on location- based routing. We first propose efficient algorithms for detecting and abstracting CNTs in the network. Using these algorithms, we present our CNT-aware location- based unicast routing protocol that achieves the guaranteed small path stretch with significantly reduced communication overhead. We then present our location-based multicast routing protocol that finds near optimal routing paths from a source node to multicast member nodes, with efficient mechanisms for controllable packet header size and energy-efficient recovery from packet losses. Our CNT-aware convergecast routing protocol improves the network lifetime by identifying network regions with concentrated network traffic and distributing the traffic by using the novel concept of virtual boundaries. Finally, we present the design and implementation details of our unified routing framework that seamlessly integrates proposed unicast, multicast, and convergecast routing protocols. Specifically, we discuss the issues regarding the implementation of our routing protocols on real hardware, and the design of the framework that significantly reduces the code and memory size to fit in a resource constrained sensor mote. We conclude with a proactive solution designed to cope with CNTs, where mobile nodes are used for “patching” CNTs to restore the network connectivity and to optimize the network performance

A mobile agent and message ferry mechanism based routing for delay tolerant network

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a class of networks characterized by long delays, frequent disconnections and partitioning of communication paths between network nodes. Due to the frequent disconnection and network partitioning, the overall performance of the network will be deteriorated sharply. The problem is how to make the network fairly connected to optimize data routing and enhance the performance of a network. The aim of this study is to improve the performance of DTN by minimizing end-to-end delivery time and increasing message delivery ratio. Therefore, this research tackles the problem of intermittent connectivity and network partitioning by introducing Agents and Ferry Mechanism based Routing (AFMR). The AFMR comprises of two stages by applying two schemes: mobile agents and ferry mechanism. The agents' scheme is proposed to deal with intermittent connectivity and network partitioning by collecting the basic information about network connection such as signal strength, nodes position in the network and distance to the destination nodes to minimize end-to-end delivery time. The second stage is to increase the message delivery ratio by moving the nodes towards the path with available network connectivity based on agents' feedback. The AFMR is evaluated through simulations and the results are compared with those of Epidemic, PRoPHET and Message Ferry (MF). The findings demonstrate that AFMR is superior to all three, with respect to the average end-to-end delivery time, message delivery ratio, network load and message drop ratio, which are regarded as extremely important metrics for the evaluation of DTN routing protocols. The AFMR achieves improved network performance in terms of end-to-end delivery time (56.3%); enhanced message delivery ratio (60.0%); mitigation of message drop (63.5%) and reduced network load (26.1 %). The contributions of this thesis are to enhance the performance of DTN by significantly overcoming the intermittent connectivity and network partitioning problems in the network

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications