Optimisation of Mobile Communication Networks - OMCO NET

The mini conference “Optimisation of Mobile Communication Networks” focuses on advanced methods for search and optimisation applied to wireless communication networks. It is sponsored by Research & Enterprise Fund Southampton Solent University. The conference strives to widen knowledge on advanced search methods capable of optimisation of wireless communications networks. The aim is to provide a forum for exchange of recent knowledge, new ideas and trends in this progressive and challenging area. The conference will popularise new successful approaches on resolving hard tasks such as minimisation of transmit power, cooperative and optimal routing

Reliable Message Dissemination in Mobile Vehicular Networks

Les réseaux véhiculaires accueillent une multitude d’applications d’info-divertissement et de sécurité. Les applications de sécurité visent à améliorer la sécurité sur les routes (éviter les accidents), tandis que les applications d’info-divertissement visent à améliorer l'expérience des passagers. Les applications de sécurité ont des exigences rigides en termes de délais et de fiabilité ; en effet, la diffusion des messages d’urgence (envoyés par un véhicule/émetteur) devrait être fiable et rapide. Notons que, pour diffuser des informations sur une zone de taille plus grande que celle couverte par la portée de transmission d’un émetteur, il est nécessaire d’utiliser un mécanisme de transmission multi-sauts. De nombreuses approches ont été proposées pour assurer la fiabilité et le délai des dites applications. Toutefois, ces méthodes présentent plusieurs lacunes. Cette thèse, nous proposons trois contributions. La première contribution aborde la question de la diffusion fiable des messages d’urgence. A cet égard, un nouveau schéma, appelé REMD, a été proposé. Ce schéma utilise la répétition de message pour offrir une fiabilité garantie, à chaque saut, tout en assurant un court délai. REMD calcule un nombre optimal de répétitions en se basant sur l’estimation de la qualité de réception de lien dans plusieurs locations (appelées cellules) à l’intérieur de la zone couverte par la portée de transmission de l’émetteur. REMD suppose que les qualités de réception de lien des cellules adjacentes sont indépendantes. Il sélectionne, également, un nombre de véhicules, appelés relais, qui coopèrent dans le contexte de la répétition du message d’urgence pour assurer la fiabilité en multi-sauts. La deuxième contribution, appelée BCRB, vise à améliorer REMD ; elle suppose que les qualités de réception de lien des cellules adjacentes sont dépendantes ce qui est, généralement, plus réaliste. BCRB utilise les réseaux Bayésiens pour modéliser les dépendances en vue d’estimer la qualité du lien de réception avec une meilleure précision. La troisième contribution, appelée RICS, offre un accès fiable à Internet. RICS propose un modèle d’optimisation, avec une résolution exacte optimale à l'aide d’une technique de réduction de la dimension spatiale, pour le déploiement des passerelles. Chaque passerelle utilise BCRB pour établir une communication fiable avec les véhicules.Vehicular networks aim to enable a plethora of safety and infotainment applications. Safety applications aim to preserve people's lives (e.g., by helping in avoiding crashes) while infotainment applications focus on enhancing the passengers’ experience. These applications, especially safety applications, have stringent requirements in terms of reliability and delay; indeed, dissemination of an emergency message (e.g., by a vehicle/sender involved in a crash) should be reliable while satisfying short delay requirements. Note, that multi-hop dissemination is needed to reach all vehicles, in the target area, that may be outside the transmission range of the sender. Several schemes have been proposed to provide reliability and short delay for vehicular applications. However, these schemes have several limitations. Thus, the design of new solutions, to meet the requirement of vehicular applications in terms of reliability while keeping low end-to-end delay, is required. In this thesis, we propose three schemes. The first scheme is a multi-hop reliable emergency message dissemination scheme, called REMD, which guarantees a predefined reliability , using message repetitions/retransmissions, while satisfying short delay requirements. It computes an optimal number of repetitions based on the estimation of link reception quality at different locations (called cells) in the transmission range of the sender; REMD assumes that link reception qualities of adjacent cells are independent. It also adequately selects a number of vehicles, called forwarders, that cooperate in repeating the emergency message with the objective to satisfy multi-hop reliability requirements. The second scheme, called BCRB, overcomes the shortcoming of REMD by assuming that link reception qualities of adjacent cells are dependent which is more realistic in real-life scenarios. BCRB makes use of Bayesian networks to model these dependencies; this allows for more accurate estimation of link reception qualities leading to better performance of BCRB. The third scheme, called RICS, provides internet access to vehicles by establishing multi-hop reliable paths to gateways. In RICS, the gateway placement is modeled as a k-center optimisation problem. A space dimension reduction technique is used to solve the problem in exact time. Each gateway makes use of BCRB to establish reliable communication paths to vehicles

Easy Wireless: broadband ad-hoc networking for emergency services

Wireless ad-hoc networks will enable emergency services to continuously overview and act upon the actual status of the situation by retrieving and exchanging detailed up-to-date information between the rescue workers. Deployment of high-bandwidth, robust, self-organising ad-hoc networks will enable quicker response to typical what/where/when questions, than the more vulnerable low-bandwidth communication networks currently in use. This paper addresses a number of results of the Easy Wireless project that enable high bandwidth robust ad-hoc networking. Most of the concepts presented here have been experimentally verified and/or prototyped

Mobile Computing in Digital Ecosystems: Design Issues and Challenges

In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g., portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem, i.e., an ecosystem constructed out of so-called digital organisms (see below), that can foster the development of novel distributed services. In this context, a human user equipped with his/her own mobile devices, can be though of as a digital organism (DO), a subsystem characterized by a set of peculiar features and resources it can offer to the rest of the ecosystem for use from its peer DOs. The internal organization of the DO must address issues of management of its own resources, including power consumption. Inside the DO and among DOs, peer-to-peer interaction mechanisms can be conveniently deployed to favor resource sharing and data dissemination. Throughout this paper, we show that most of the solutions and technologies needed to construct a digital ecosystem are already available. What is still missing is a framework (i.e., mechanisms, protocols, services) that can support effectively the integration and cooperation of these technologies. In addition, in the following we show that that framework can be implemented as a middleware subsystem that enables novel and ubiquitous forms of computation and communication. Finally, in order to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce some experimental results we have obtained from preliminary implementations of (parts of) that subsystem.Comment: Proceedings of the 7th International wireless Communications and Mobile Computing conference (IWCMC-2011), Emergency Management: Communication and Computing Platforms Worksho

Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks

MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless networks. This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples, however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability. First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical 0. Abstract 3 function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process, to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management, while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data ferries is investigated

Wireless Multi Hop Access Networks and Protocols

As more and more applications and services in our society now depend on the Internet, it is important that dynamically deployed wireless multi hop networks are able to gain access to the Internet and other infrastructure networks and services. This thesis proposes and evaluates solutions for providing multi hop Internet Access. It investigates how ad hoc networks can be combined with wireless and mesh networks in order to create wireless multi hop access networks. When several access points to the Internet are available, and the mobile node roams to a new access point, the node has to make a decision when and how to change its point of attachment. The thesis describes how to consider the rapid fluctuations of the wireless medium, how to handle the fact that other nodes on the path to the access point are also mobile which results in frequent link and route breaks, and the impact the change of attachment has on already existing connections. Medium access and routing protocols have been developed that consider both the long term and the short term variations of a mobile wireless network. The long term variations consider the fact that as nodes are mobile, links will frequently break and new links appear and thus the network topology map is constantly redrawn. The short term variations consider the rapid fluctuations of the wireless channel caused by mobility and multi path propagation deviations. In order to achieve diversity forwarding, protocols are presented which consider the network topology and the state of the wireless channel when decisions about forwarding need to be made. The medium access protocols are able to perform multi dimensional fast link adaptation on a per packet level with forwarding considerations. This i ncludes power, rate, code and channel adaptation. This will enable the type of performance improvements that are of significant importance for the success of multi hop wireless networks

An Overview on Wireless Sensor Networks Technology and Evolution

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable new applications and require non-conventional paradigms for protocol design due to several constraints. Owing to the requirement for low device complexity together with low energy consumption (i.e., long network lifetime), a proper balance between communication and signal/data processing capabilities must be found. This motivates a huge effort in research activities, standardization process, and industrial investments on this field since the last decade. This survey paper aims at reporting an overview of WSNs technologies, main applications and standards, features in WSNs design, and evolutions. In particular, some peculiar applications, such as those based on environmental monitoring, are discussed and design strategies highlighted; a case study based on a real implementation is also reported. Trends and possible evolutions are traced. Emphasis is given to the IEEE 802.15.4 technology, which enables many applications of WSNs. Some example of performance characteristics of 802.15.4-based networks are shown and discussed as a function of the size of the WSN and the data type to be exchanged among nodes