2,389 research outputs found
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
An Upper Bound on Multi-hop Transmission Capacity with Dynamic Routing Selection
This paper develops upper bounds on the end-to-end transmission capacity of
multi-hop wireless networks. Potential source-destination paths are dynamically
selected from a pool of randomly located relays, from which a closed-form lower
bound on the outage probability is derived in terms of the expected number of
potential paths. This is in turn used to provide an upper bound on the number
of successful transmissions that can occur per unit area, which is known as the
transmission capacity. The upper bound results from assuming independence among
the potential paths, and can be viewed as the maximum diversity case. A useful
aspect of the upper bound is its simple form for an arbitrary-sized network,
which allows insights into how the number of hops and other network parameters
affect spatial throughput in the non-asymptotic regime. The outage probability
analysis is then extended to account for retransmissions with a maximum number
of allowed attempts. In contrast to prevailing wisdom, we show that
predetermined routing (such as nearest-neighbor) is suboptimal, since more hops
are not useful once the network is interference-limited. Our results also make
clear that randomness in the location of relay sets and dynamically varying
channel states is helpful in obtaining higher aggregate throughput, and that
dynamic route selection should be used to exploit path diversity.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory, 201
Social-Aware Forwarding Improves Routing Performance in Pocket Switched Networks
Several social-aware forwarding strategies have been recently introduced in
opportunistic networks, and proved effective in considerably in- creasing
routing performance through extensive simulation studies based on real-world
data. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of storing a
considerable amount of state information (e.g, history of past encounters) at
the nodes. Hence, whether the benefits on routing performance comes directly
from the social-aware forwarding mechanism, or indirectly by the fact state
information is exploited is not clear. Thus, the question of whether
social-aware forwarding by itself is effective in improving opportunistic
network routing performance remained unaddressed so far. In this paper, we give
a first, positive answer to the above question, by investigating the expected
message delivery time as the size of the net- work grows larger
Performance Modelling and Optimisation of Multi-hop Networks
A major challenge in the design of large-scale networks is to predict and optimise the
total time and energy consumption required to deliver a packet from a source node to a
destination node. Examples of such complex networks include wireless ad hoc and sensor
networks which need to deal with the effects of node mobility, routing inaccuracies, higher
packet loss rates, limited or time-varying effective bandwidth, energy constraints, and the
computational limitations of the nodes. They also include more reliable communication
environments, such as wired networks, that are susceptible to random failures, security
threats and malicious behaviours which compromise their quality of service (QoS) guarantees.
In such networks, packets traverse a number of hops that cannot be determined
in advance and encounter non-homogeneous network conditions that have been largely
ignored in the literature. This thesis examines analytical properties of packet travel in
large networks and investigates the implications of some packet coding techniques on both
QoS and resource utilisation.
Specifically, we use a mixed jump and diffusion model to represent packet traversal
through large networks. The model accounts for network non-homogeneity regarding
routing and the loss rate that a packet experiences as it passes successive segments of a
source to destination route. A mixed analytical-numerical method is developed to compute
the average packet travel time and the energy it consumes. The model is able to capture
the effects of increased loss rate in areas remote from the source and destination, variable
rate of advancement towards destination over the route, as well as of defending against
malicious packets within a certain distance from the destination. We then consider sending
multiple coded packets that follow independent paths to the destination node so as to
mitigate the effects of losses and routing inaccuracies. We study a homogeneous medium
and obtain the time-dependent properties of the packetâs travel process, allowing us to
compare the merits and limitations of coding, both in terms of delivery times and energy
efficiency. Finally, we propose models that can assist in the analysis and optimisation
of the performance of inter-flow network coding (NC). We analyse two queueing models
for a router that carries out NC, in addition to its standard packet routing function. The
approach is extended to the study of multiple hops, which leads to an optimisation problem
that characterises the optimal time that packets should be held back in a router, waiting
for coding opportunities to arise, so that the total packet end-to-end delay is minimised
Distributed Community Detection in Dynamic Graphs
Inspired by the increasing interest in self-organizing social opportunistic
networks, we investigate the problem of distributed detection of unknown
communities in dynamic random graphs. As a formal framework, we consider the
dynamic version of the well-studied \emph{Planted Bisection Model}
\sdG(n,p,q) where the node set of the network is partitioned into two
unknown communities and, at every time step, each possible edge is
active with probability if both nodes belong to the same community, while
it is active with probability (with ) otherwise. We also consider a
time-Markovian generalization of this model.
We propose a distributed protocol based on the popular \emph{Label
Propagation Algorithm} and prove that, when the ratio is larger than
(for an arbitrarily small constant ), the protocol finds the right
"planted" partition in time even when the snapshots of the dynamic
graph are sparse and disconnected (i.e. in the case ).Comment: Version I
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 othersâ 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 applicationsâ 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
Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks
Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting
a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian
fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and
reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio
techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the
complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services.
Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data
analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making.
Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating
on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep
learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling
applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets),
cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks
(M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the
motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them
for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless
networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig
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