Reliable routing scheme for indoor sensor networks

Indoor Wireless sensor networks require a highly dynamic, adaptive routing scheme to deal with the high rate of topology changes due to fading of indoor wireless channels. Besides that, energy consumption rate needs to be consistently distributed among sensor nodes and efficient utilization of battery power is essential. If only the link reliability metric is considered in the routing scheme, it may create long hops routes, and the high quality paths will be frequently used. This leads to shorter lifetime of such paths; thereby the entire network's lifetime will be significantly minimized. This paper briefly presents a reliable load-balanced routing (RLBR) scheme for indoor ad hoc wireless sensor networks, which integrates routing information from different layers. The proposed scheme aims to redistribute the relaying workload and the energy usage among relay sensor nodes to achieve balanced energy dissipation; thereby maximizing the functional network lifetime. RLBR scheme was tested and benchmarked against the TinyOS-2.x implementation of MintRoute on an indoor testbed comprising 20 Mica2 motes and low power listening (LPL) link layer provided by CC1000 radio. RLBR scheme consumes less energy for communications while reducing topology repair latency and achieves better connectivity and communication reliability in terms of end-to-end packets delivery performance

Opportunistic Routing in Multihop Wireless Networks: Capacity, Energy Efficiency, and Security

Opportunistic routing (OR) takes advantages of the spatial diversity and broadcast nature of wireless networks to combat the time-varying links by involving multiple neighboring nodes (forwarding candidates) for each packet relay. This dissertation studies the properties, energy efficiency, capacity, throughput, protocol design and security issues about OR in multihop wireless networks. Firstly, we study geographic opportunistic routing (GOR), a variant of OR which makes use of nodes\u27 location information. We identify and prove three important properties of GOR. The first one is on prioritizing the forwarding candidates according to their geographic advancements to the destination. The second one is on choosing the forwarding candidates based on their advancements and link qualities in order to maximize the expected packet advancement (EPA) with different number of forwarding candidates. The third one is on the concavity of the maximum EPA in respect to the number of forwarding candidates. We further propose a local metric, EPA per unit energy consumption, to tradeoff the routing performance and energy efficiency for GOR. Leveraging the proved properties of GOR, we propose two efficient algorithms to select and prioritize forwarding candidates to maximize the local metric. Secondly, capacity is a fundamental issue in multihop wireless networks. We propose a framework to compute the end-to-end throughput bound or capacity of OR in single/multirate systems given OR strategies (candidate selection and prioritization). Taking into account wireless interference and unique properties of OR, we propose a new method of constructing transmission conflict graphs, and we introduce the concept of concurrent transmission sets to allow the proper formulation of the maximum end-to-end throughput problem as a maximum-flow linear programming problem subject to the transmission conflict constraints. We also propose two OR metrics: expected medium time (EMT) and expected advancement rate (EAR), and the corresponding distributed and local rate and candidate set selection schemes, the Least Medium Time OR (LMTOR) and the Multirate Geographic OR (MGOR). We further extend our framework to compute the capacity of OR in multi-radio multi-channel systems with dynamic OR strategies. We study the necessary and sufficient conditions for the schedulability of a traffic demand vector associated with a transmitter to its forwarding candidates in a concurrent transmission set. We further propose an LP approach and a heuristic algorithm to obtain an opportunistic forwarding strategy scheduling that satisfies a traffic demand vector. Our methodology can be used to calculate the end-to-end throughput bound of OR in multi-radio/channel/rate multihop wireless networks, as well as to study the OR behaviors (such as candidate selection and prioritization) under different network configurations. Thirdly, protocol design of OR in a contention-based medium access environment is an important and challenging issue. In order to avoid duplication, we should ensure only the best receiver of each packet to forward it in an efficient way. We investigate the existing candidate coordination schemes and propose a fast slotted acknowledgment (FSA) to further improve the performance of OR by using a single ACK to coordinate the forwarding candidates with the help of the channel sensing technique. Furthermore, we study the throughput of GOR in multi-rate and single-rate systems. We introduce a framework to analyze the one-hop throughput of GOR, and provide a deeper insight on the trade-off between the benefit (packet advancement, bandwidth, and transmission reliability) and cost (medium time delay) associated with the node collaboration. We propose a local metric named expected one-hop throughput (EOT) to balance the benefit and cost. Finally, packet reception ratio (PRR) has been widely used as an indicator of the link quality in multihop wireless networks. Many routing protocols including OR in wireless networks depend on the PRR information to make routing decision. Providing accurate link quality measurement (LQM) is essential to ensure the right operation of these routing protocols. However, the existing LQM mechanisms are subject to malicious attacks, thus can not guarantee to provide correct link quality information. We analyze the security vulnerabilities in the existing link quality measurement (LQM) mechanisms and propose an efficient broadcast-based secure LQM (SLQM) mechanism, which prevents the malicious attackers from reporting a higher PRR than the actual one. We analyze the security strength and the cost of the proposed mechanism

IST-2000-30148 I-METRA: D6.2 Implications in re-configurable systems beyond 3G (Part 2)

This activity evaluates the extension of the bandwidth of the UTRA MIMO HSDPA concept to 20 MHz, which is precisely the bandwidth of HIPERLAN/2. This would allow a fair comparison between the performance of UTRA MIMO HSDPA and the enhanced HIPERLAN/2. The bandwidth expansion would be the consequence of multiplying the chip rate of the W-CDMA spreading by four, i.e., 3.84 x 4 = 15.36 Mcps. A higher bandwidth MIMO channel model is necessary and this will be developed based on the channel model already developed in WP2. High data rates are required to satisfy the ever-increasing application requirements in future wireless communication systems. Recent investigations have indicated that a peak data rate of up to 20Mbps per user in the DL may be required for satisfactory reception of bursty traffic. As the transmission powers (of both mobile terminals and base stations) are limited, higher data rates lead to the reduction of the effective coverage area of a cell. That is, only users that are close to the base station will be able to communicate with high data rates, while users far away from the base station will only be able to use low data rates.Preprin

Towards a Practical and Fair Rate Allocation for Multihop Wireless Networks based on a Simple Node Model

IEEE 802.11 is often considered as the underlying wireless technology of multihop wireless networks. But the use of 802.11 in such networks raises issues, like efficiency and/or fairness issues. Different kinds of solutions have been proposed to overcome these problems. One approach is to design new MAC protocols that provide alternatives to the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Although these solutions are of some interest, it should probably take some time before new wireless network interface cards based on one of these solutions are developed and released. Another approach is to consider that 802.11 will remain the underlying wireless technology and to design solutions above it. Several solutions based on rate allocation have been proposed so far. The main drawback of the proposed solutions is that they rely on a radio medium sharing model that is difficult to compute in a wireless, distributed and mobile environment. Indeed, very few of these solutions have been derived into a network protocol. In this article, we propose a distributed and dynamic rate allocation solution that is based on a simple sharing model. Due to its simplicity, we can derive a network protocol that can be practically used in multihop wireless networks. This protocol provides a fair bandwidth sharing between end-to-end flows while maintaining an efficient overall throughput in the network. This solution has been implemented in NS2 and evaluated by simulations

Connectivity, Coverage and Placement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless communication between sensors allows the formation of flexible sensor networks, which can be deployed rapidly over wide or inaccessible areas. However, the need to gather data from all sensors in the network imposes constraints on the distances between sensors. This survey describes the state of the art in techniques for determining the minimum density and optimal locations of relay nodes and ordinary sensors to ensure connectivity, subject to various degrees of uncertainty in the locations of the nodes

Reliable load-balancing routing for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are energy and resource constrained. Energy limitations make it advantageous to balance radio transmissions across multiple sensor nodes. Thus, load balanced routing is highly desirable and has motivated a significant volume of research. Multihop sensor network architecture can also provide greater coverage, but requires a highly reliable and adaptive routing scheme to accommodate frequent topology changes. Current reliability-oriented protocols degrade energy efficiency and increase network latency. This thesis develops and evaluates a novel solution to provide energy-efficient routing while enhancing packet delivery reliability. This solution, a reliable load-balancing routing (RLBR), makes four contributions in the area of reliability, resiliency and load balancing in support of the primary objective of network lifetime maximisation. The results are captured using real world testbeds as well as simulations. The first contribution uses sensor node emulation, at the instruction cycle level, to characterise the additional processing and computation overhead required by the routing scheme. The second contribution is based on real world testbeds which comprises two different TinyOS-enabled senor platforms under different scenarios. The third contribution extends and evaluates RLBR using large-scale simulations. It is shown that RLBR consumes less energy while reducing topology repair latency and supports various aggregation weights by redistributing packet relaying loads. It also shows a balanced energy usage and a significant lifetime gain. Finally, the forth contribution is a novel variable transmission power control scheme which is created based on the experience gained from prior practical and simulated studies. This power control scheme operates at the data link layer to dynamically reduce unnecessarily high transmission power while maintaining acceptable link reliability