Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

Distributed Data-Gathering and -Processing in Smart Cities: An Information-Centric Approach

The technological advancements along with the proliferation of smart and connected devices (things) motivated the exploration of the creation of smart cities aimed at improving the quality of life, economic growth, and efficient resource utilization. Some recent initiatives defined a smart city network as the interconnection of the existing independent and heterogeneous networks and the infrastructure. However, considering the heterogeneity of the devices, communication technologies, network protocols, and platforms the interoperability of these networks is a challenge requiring more attention. In this paper, we propose the design of a novel Information-Centric Smart City architecture (iSmart), focusing on the demand of the future applications, such as efficient machineto-machine communication, low latency computation offloading, large data communication requirements, and advanced security. In designing iSmart, we use the Named-Data Networking (NDN) architecture as the underlying communication substrate to promote semantics-based communication and achieve seamless compute/data sharing

Effects of physical channel separation on application flows in a multi-radio multi-hop wireless mesh network: An experimental study on BilMesh testbed

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper, we introduce BilMesh, an indoor 802.11 b/g mesh networking testbed we established, and we report about our performance experiments conducted on multi-hop topologies with single-radio and multi-radio relay nodes. We investigate and report the effects of using multi-radio, multi-channel relay nodes in the mesh networking infrastructure in terms of network and application layer performance metrics. We also study the effects of physical channel separation on achievable end-to-end goodput perceived by the applications in the multi-radio case by varying the channel separation between the radio interfaces of a multi-radio relay node. We have observed that the difference between TCP and UDP goodput performances together with the delay and jitter performance depends on the hop count. We also observed that assigning overlapping channels with a central frequency separation of 5-15 MHz may render the CSMA mechanism used in 802.11 MAC ineffective and hence reduce the overall network performance. Finally, we provide some suggestions that can be considered while designing related protocols and algorithms to deal with the observed facts. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved