Algorithmic Aspects of Energy-Delay Tradeoff in Multihop Cooperative Wireless Networks

We consider the problem of energy-efficient transmission in delay constrained cooperative multihop wireless networks. The combinatorial nature of cooperative multihop schemes makes it difficult to design efficient polynomial-time algorithms for deciding which nodes should take part in cooperation, and when and with what power they should transmit. In this work, we tackle this problem in memoryless networks with or without delay constraints, i.e., quality of service guarantee. We analyze a wide class of setups, including unicast, multicast, and broadcast, and two main cooperative approaches, namely: energy accumulation (EA) and mutual information accumulation (MIA). We provide a generalized algorithmic formulation of the problem that encompasses all those cases. We investigate the similarities and differences of EA and MIA in our generalized formulation. We prove that the broadcast and multicast problems are, in general, not only NP hard but also o(log(n)) inapproximable. We break these problems into three parts: ordering, scheduling and power control, and propose a novel algorithm that, given an ordering, can optimally solve the joint power allocation and scheduling problems simultaneously in polynomial time. We further show empirically that this algorithm used in conjunction with an ordering derived heuristically using the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm yields near-optimal performance in typical settings. For the unicast case, we prove that although the problem remains NP hard with MIA, it can be solved optimally and in polynomial time when EA is used. We further use our algorithm to study numerically the trade-off between delay and power-efficiency in cooperative broadcast and compare the performance of EA vs MIA as well as the performance of our cooperative algorithm with a smart noncooperative algorithm in a broadcast setting.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Minimizing energy and maximizing network lifetime multicasting in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract-Most mobile nodes in a wireless ad hoc network are powered by energy limited batteries, the limited battery lifetime imposes a constraint on the network performance. Therefore, energy efficiency is paramount of importance in the design of routing protocols for the applications in such a network, and efficient operations are critical to enhance the network lifetime. In this paper we consider energy-efficient routing for the minimizing energy and maximizing network lifetime multicast problem in ad hoc networks. We aim to construct a multicast tree rooted at the source and spanning the destination nodes such that the minimum residual battery energy (also referred to the network lifetime) among the nodes in the network is maximized and the total transmission energy consumption is minimized. Due to the NP-hardness of the concerned problem, all previously proposed algorithms for it are heuristic algorithms, and there is little known about the analytical performance of these algorithms in terms of approximation ratios. We here focus on devising approximation algorithms for the problem with provably guaranteed approximation ratios. Specifically, we present an approximation algorithm for finding a multicast tree such that the total transmission energy consumption is no more than γ times of the optimum, under the constraint that the network lifetime is no less than β times of the optimum, where γ is either 4 ln K or O(K ), depending on whether the network is symmetric or not, and β are constants with 0 < , β ≤ 1, and K is the number of destination nodes in a multicast session

An analysis of the lifetime of OLSR networks

The Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol is a well-known route discovery protocol for ad-hoc networks. OLSR optimizes the flooding of link state information through the network using multipoint relays (MPRs). Only nodes selected as MPRs are responsible for forwarding control traffic. Many research papers aim to optimize the selection of MPRs with a specific purpose in mind: e.g., to minimize their number, to keep paths with high Quality of Service or to maximize the network lifetime (the time until the first node runs out of energy). In such analyzes often the effects of the network structure on the MPR selection are not taken into account. In this paper we show that the structure of the network can have a large impact on the MPR selection. In highly regular structures (such as grids) there is even no variation in the MPR sets that result from various MPR selection mechanisms. Furthermore, we study the influence of the network structure on the network lifetime problem in a setting where at regular intervals messages are broadcasted using MPRs. We introduce the ’maximum forcedness ratio’, as a key parameter of the network to describe how much variation there is in the lifetime results of various MPR selection heuristics. Although we focus our attention to OLSR, being a widely implemented protocol, on a more abstract level our results describe the structure of connected sets dominating the 2-hop neighborhood of a node

Online unicasting and multicasting in software-defined networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as the paradigm of the next-generation networking through separating the control plane from the data plane. In a software-defined network, the forwarding table at each switch node usually is implemented by expensive and power-hungry Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) that only has limited numbers of entries. In addition, the bandwidth capacity at each link is limited as well. Provisioning quality services to users by admitting their requests subject to such critical network resource constraints is a fundamental problem, and very little attention has been paid. In this paper, we study online unicasting and multicasting in SDNs with an objective of maximizing the network throughput under network resource constraints, for which we first propose a novel cost model to accurately capture the usages of network resources at switch nodes and links. We then devise two online algorithms with competitive ratios O(log n) and O(Kϵlog n) for online unicasting and multicasting, respectively, where n is the network size, K is the maximum number of destinations in any multicast request, and ϵ is a constant with 0 < ϵ ≤ 1. We finally evaluate the proposed algorithms empirically through simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are very promising

Routing and Broadcast Development for Minimizing Transmission Interruption in Multi rate Wireless Mesh Networks using Directional Antennas

Using directional antennas to reduce interference and improve throughput in multi hop wireless networks has attracted much attention from the research community in recent years. In this paper, we consider the issue of minimum delay broadcast in multi rate wireless mesh networks using directional antennas. We are given a set of mesh routers equipped with directional antennas, one of which is the gateway node and the source of the broadcast. Our objective is to minimize the total transmission delay for all the other nodes to receive a broadcast packet from the source, by determining the set of relay nodes and computing the number and orientations of beams formed by each relay node. We propose a heuristic solution with two steps. Firstly, we construct a broadcast routing tree by defining a new routing metric to select the relay nodes and compute the optimal antenna beams for each relay node. Then, we use a greedy method to make scheduling of concurrent transmissions without causing beam interference. Extensive simulations have demonstrated that our proposed method can reduce the broadcast delay significantly compared with the methods using omnidirectional antennas and single-rate transmission. In addition, the results also show that our method performs better than the method with fixed antenna beams. Keywords: Multihop, Wireless, Mesh, Omnidirectional