A Review of Interference Reduction in Wireless Networks Using Graph Coloring Methods

The interference imposes a significant negative impact on the performance of wireless networks. With the continuous deployment of larger and more sophisticated wireless networks, reducing interference in such networks is quickly being focused upon as a problem in today's world. In this paper we analyze the interference reduction problem from a graph theoretical viewpoint. A graph coloring methods are exploited to model the interference reduction problem. However, additional constraints to graph coloring scenarios that account for various networking conditions result in additional complexity to standard graph coloring. This paper reviews a variety of algorithmic solutions for specific network topologies.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Evolving SDN for Low-Power IoT Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers a flexible and scalable architecture that abstracts decision making away from individual devices and provides a programmable network platform. However, implementing a centralized SDN architecture within the constraints of a low-power wireless network faces considerable challenges. Not only is controller traffic subject to jitter due to unreliable links and network contention, but the overhead generated by SDN can severely affect the performance of other traffic. This paper addresses the challenge of bringing high-overhead SDN architecture to IEEE 802.15.4 networks. We explore how traditional SDN needs to evolve in order to overcome the constraints of low-power wireless networks, and discuss protocol and architectural optimizations necessary to reduce SDN control overhead - the main barrier to successful implementation. We argue that interoperability with the existing protocol stack is necessary to provide a platform for controller discovery and coexistence with legacy networks. We consequently introduce {\mu}SDN, a lightweight SDN framework for Contiki, with both IPv6 and underlying routing protocol interoperability, as well as optimizing a number of elements within the SDN architecture to reduce control overhead to practical levels. We evaluate {\mu}SDN in terms of latency, energy, and packet delivery. Through this evaluation we show how the cost of SDN control overhead (both bootstrapping and management) can be reduced to a point where comparable performance and scalability is achieved against an IEEE 802.15.4-2012 RPL-based network. Additionally, we demonstrate {\mu}SDN through simulation: providing a use-case where the SDN configurability can be used to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for critical network flows experiencing interference, and we achieve considerable reductions in delay and jitter in comparison to a scenario without SDN

Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?

The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics

CCACK: Efficient Network Coding Based Opportunistic Routing Through Cumulative Coded Acknowledgments

The use of random linear network coding (NC) has significantly simplified the design of opportunistic routing (OR) protocols by removing the need of coordination among forwarding nodes for avoiding duplicate transmissions. However, NC-based OR protocols face a new challenge: How many coded packets should each forwarder transmit? To avoid the overhead of feedback exchange, most practical existing NC-based OR protocols compute offline the expected number of transmissions for each forwarder using heuristics based on periodic measurements of the average link loss rates and the ETX metric. Although attractive due to their minimal coordination overhead, these approaches may suffer significant performance degradation in dynamic wireless environments with continuously changing levels of channel gains, interference, and background traffic. In this paper, we propose CCACK, a new efficient NC-based OR protocol. CCACK exploits a novel Cumulative Coded ACKnowledgment scheme that allows nodes to acknowledge network coded traffic to their upstream nodes in a simple way, oblivious to loss rates, and with practically zero overhead. In addition, the cumulative coded acknowledgment scheme in CCACK enables an efficient credit-based, rate control algorithm. Our experiments on a 22-node 802.11 WMN testbed show that compared to MORE, a state-of-the-art NC based OR protocol, CCACK improves both throughput and fairness, by up to 3.2x and 83%, respectively, with average improvements of 11- 36% and 5.7-8.3%, respectively, for different numbers of concurrent flows. Our extensive simulations show that the gains are actually much higher in large networks, with longer routing paths between sources and destinations

Early Experiences in Traffic Engineering Exploiting Path Diversity: A Practical Approach

Recent literature has proved that stable dynamic routing algorithms have solid theoretical foundation that makes them suitable to be implemented in a real protocol, and used in practice in many different operational network contexts. Such algorithms inherit much of the properties of congestion controllers implementing one of the possible combination of AQM/ECN schemes at nodes and flow control at sources. In this paper we propose a linear program formulation of the multi-commodity flow problem with congestion control, under max-min fairness, comprising demands with or without exogenous peak rates. Our evaluations of the gain, using path diversity, in scenarios as intra-domain traffic engineering and wireless mesh networks encourages real implementations, especially in presence of hot spots demands and non uniform traffic matrices. We propose a flow aware perspective of the subject by using a natural multi-path extension to current congestion controllers and show its performance with respect to current proposals. Since flow aware architectures exploiting path diversity are feasible, scalable, robust and nearly optimal in presence of flows with exogenous peak rates, we claim that our solution rethinked in the context of realistic traffic assumptions performs as better as an optimal approach with all the additional benefits of the flow aware paradigm