NEIGHBOURHOOD LOAD ROUTING AND MULTI-CHANNELS IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS

As an emerging technology, wireless mesh networks are making significant progress in the area of wireless networks in recent years. Routing in Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is challenging because of the unpredictable variations of the wireless environment. Traditional mechanisms have been proved that the routing performance would get deteriorated and ideal metrics must be explored. Most wireless routing protocols that are currently available are designed to use a single channel. The available network capacity can be increased by using multiple channels, but this requires the development of new protocols specifically designed for multi-channel operation. In this paper, we propose Neighbourhood load routing metric in single channel mesh networks and also present the technique to utilize multiple channels and multiple interfaces between routers for communication. The traditional routing metrics Hop Count and Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmission Time (WCETT) are used in routing. We compare performance of AODV-HOP, WCETT and NLR routing metrics in singlechannel and multichannel environment by considering throughput and end to end delay performance metrics. Our results show that NLR performs better in singlechannel environment

Minimum interference channel assignment for multicast in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. In a WMN, wireless routers provide multi-hop wireless connectivity between hosts in the network and also allow hosts to access the Internet via the gateway nodes. Wireless routers are typically equipped with multiple radios operating on different channels to increase network throughput. Multicast is a form of communication that delivers data from a source to a set of destinations simultaneously. It is used in a number of applications such as distributed games, distance education, and video conferencing. In this work, we address the channel assignment problem for multicast in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs. In a multi-radio multi-channel WMN, when two nearby nodes transmit on the same channel, they will interfere with each other and cause throughput decrease. Thus, an important goal for multicast channel assignment is to reduce the interference among the tree nodes. We have developed a Minimum Interference Channel Assignment (MICA) algorithm for multicast that accurately models the interference relationship between pairs of multicast tree nodes using the concept of interference factor and assigns channels to tree nodes to minimize interference within the multicast tree. Simulation results show that MICA achieves higher throughout and lower end-to-end packet delay compared with an existing channel assignment algorithm named MCM. In addition, MICA achieves much lower throughput variation among the destination nodes than MCM

Maximizing multicast call acceptance rate in multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing bandwidth-guaranteed multicast tree in multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks. We focus on the scenario of dynamic multicast call arrival, where each call has a specific bandwidth requirement. A call is accepted if a multicast tree with sufficient bandwidth on each link can be constructed. Intuitively, if the carried load on both the most-heavily loaded channel and the most-heavily loaded node is minimized, the traffic load in the network will be balanced. If the network load is balanced, more room will be available for accommodating future calls. This would maximize the call acceptance rate in the network. With the above notion of load balancing in mind, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is formulated for constructing bandwidth-guaranteed tree. We show that the above problem is NP-hard, and an efficient heuristic algorithm called Largest Coverage Shortest-Path First (LC-SPF) is devised. Simulation results show that LC-SPF yields comparable call acceptance rate as the ILP formulation, but with much shorter running time. © 2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

The application of network coding to multicast routing in wireless networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-62).This thesis considers the application of network coding and opportunistic routing to improve the performance of multicast flows in wireless networks. Network coding allows routers to randomly mix packets before forwarding them. This randomness ensures that routers that hear the same transmission are unlikely to forward the same packets, which permits routers to exploit wireless opportunism with minimal coordination. By mixing packets, network coding is able to reduce the number of transmissions necessary to convey packets to multiple receivers, which can lead to a large increase in throughput for multicast traffic. We discuss the design of a multicast enabled variant of MORE, a network coding based protocol for file transfer in wireless mesh networks, and evaluate this extension, which we call MORE-M, in a 20-node indoor wireless testbed. We compare MORE-M to a wireless multicast protocol that takes an approach similar to that of wired multicast by using the ETX metric to build unicast routing trees. We also compare MORE-M to a multicast enabled variant of the ExOR routing protocol. Experiments show that MORE-M's gains increase with the number of destinations, and are 35-200% greater than that of ExOR. We then consider the problem of video streaming in a wireless local area network for applications such as video conferencing. A network coding based protocol that uses opportunistic receptions at clients is proposed. We evaluate the design in our testbed and demonstrate that the use of network coding and, in particular, the use of wireless opportunism increase the quality of the video stream.by Michael Jennings.S.M

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Traffic engineering multi-layer optimization for wireless mesh network transmission a campus network routing protocol transmission performance inhancement

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe wireless mesh network is a potential network for the future due to its excellent inherent characteristic for dynamic self-healing, self-configuration and self-organization. It also has the advantage of easy interoperability networking and the ability to form multi-linked ad-hoc networks. It has a decentralized topology, is cheap and highly scalable. Furthermore, its ease in deployment and easy maintenance are other inherent networking qualities. These aforementioned qualities of the wireless mesh network bring advantages to transmission capability of heterogeneous networks. However, transmissions in wireless mesh network create comparative performance based challenges such as congestion, load-balancing, scalability over increasing networks and coverage capacity. Consequently, these challenges and problems in the routing and switching of packets in the wireless mesh network routing protocols led to a proposal on the resolution of these failures with a combination algorithm and a management based security for the network and its transmitted packets. There are equally contentious services like reliability of the network and quality of service for real-time multimedia traffic flows with other challenges such as path computation and selection in the wireless mesh network. This thesis is therefore a cumulative proposal to the resolution of the outlined challenges and open research areas posed by using wireless mesh network routing protocol. It advances the resolution of these challenges in the mesh environment using a hybrid optimization – traffic engineering, to increase the effectiveness and the reliability of the network. It also proffers a cumulative resolution of the diverse contributions on wireless mesh network routing protocol and transmission. Adaptation and optimization are carried out on the wireless mesh network designed network using traffic engineering mechanism and technique. The research examines the patterns of mesh packet transmission and evaluates the challenges and failures in the mesh network packet transmission. It develops a solution based algorithm for resolutions and proposes the traffic engineering based solution.. These resultant performances and analysis are usually tested and compared over wireless mesh IEEE802.11n or other older proposed documented solution. This thesis used a carefully designed campus mesh network to show a comparative evaluation of an optimal performance of the mesh nodes and routers over a normal IEE802.11n based wireless domain network to show differentiation by optimization using the created algorithms. Furthermore, the indexes of performance being the metric are used to measure the utility and the reliability, including capacity and throughput at the destination during traffic engineered transmission. In addition, the security of these transmitted data and packets are optimized under a traffic engineered technique. Finally, this thesis offers an understanding to the security contribution using traffic engineering resolution to create a management algorithm for processing and computation of the wireless mesh networks security needs. The results of this thesis confirmed, completed and extended the existing predictions with real measurement

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