A Survey on Multihop Ad Hoc Networks for Disaster Response Scenarios

Disastrous events are one of the most challenging applications of multihop ad hoc networks due to possible damages of existing telecommunication infrastructure.The deployed cellular communication infrastructure might be partially or completely destroyed after a natural disaster. Multihop ad hoc communication is an interesting alternative to deal with the lack of communications in disaster scenarios. They have evolved since their origin, leading to differentad hoc paradigms such as MANETs, VANETs, DTNs, or WSNs.This paper presents a survey on multihop ad hoc network paradigms for disaster scenarios.It highlights their applicability to important tasks in disaster relief operations. More specifically, the paper reviews the main work found in the literature, which employed ad hoc networks in disaster scenarios.In addition, it discusses the open challenges and the future research directions for each different ad hoc paradigm

Contributions to the Performance Analysis of Intervehicular Communications Systems and Schemes

RÉSUMÉ Le but des systèmes de communication intervéhicule (Inter-Vehicle Communication – IVC) est d'améliorer la sécurité de conduite en utilisant des capteurs et des techniques de communication sans fil pour être en mesure de communiquer mutuellement sans aucune intervention extérieure. Avec l'utilisation de ces systèmes, les communications véhicule à véhicule (V2V) peuvent être plus efficaces dans la prévention des accidents et la décongestion de la circulation que si chaque véhicule travaillait individuellement. Une des solutions proposées pour les systèmes IVC est l’utilisation des systèmes de communication coopérative, qui en principe, augmentent l'efficacité spectrale et énergétique, la couverture du réseau, et réduit la probabilité de défaillance. La diversité d'antenne (entrées multiples sorties multiples « Multiple-Input Multiple-Output » ou MIMO) peut également être une alternative pour les systèmes IVC pour améliorer la capacité du canal et la diversité (fiabilité), mais en échange d’une complexité accrue. Toutefois, l'application de telles solutions est difficile, car les communications sans fil entre les véhicules sont soumises à d’importants effets d'évanouissements des canaux appelés (canaux sujets aux évanouissements de n*Rayleigh, « n*Rayleigh fading channels»), ce qui conduit à la dégradation des performances. Par conséquent, dans cette thèse, nous proposons une analyse de la performance globale des systèmes de transmission coopératifs et MIMO sur des canaux sujets aux évanouissements de n*Rayleigh. Cette analyse permettra d’aider les chercheurs pour la conception et la mise en œuvre de systèmes de communication V2V avec une complexité moindre. En particulier, nous étudions d'abord la performance de la sélection du relais de coopération avec les systèmes IVC, on suppose que la transmission via « Amplify-and-Forward» (AF) ou bien «Decode-and-Forward» (DF) est assurée par N relais pour transférer le message de la source à la destination. La performance du système est analysée en termes de probabilité de défaillance, la probabilité d'erreur de symbole, et la capacité moyenne du canal. Les résultats numériques démontrent que la sélection de relais réalise une diversité de l'ordre de (d≈mN/n) pour les deux types de relais, où m est un paramètre évanouissement de Rayleigh en cascade. Nous étudions ensuite la performance des systèmes IVC à sauts multiples avec et sans relais régénératifs. Dans cette étude, nous dérivons des expressions approximatives pour la probabilité de défaillance et le niveau d’évanouissement lorsque la diversité en réception basée sur le ratio maximum de combinaison (MRC) est employée. En outre, nous analysons la répartition de puissance pour le système sous-jacent afin de minimiser la probabilité globale de défaillance. Nous montrons que la performance des systèmes régénératifs est meilleure que celle des systèmes non régénératifs lorsque l’ordre de cascade n est faible, tandis qu’ils ont des performances similaires lorsque n est élevé. Ensuite, nous considérons le problème de la détection de puissance des signaux inconnus aux n* canaux de Rayleigh. Dans ce travail, de nouvelles expressions approximatives sont dérivées de la probabilité de détection moyenne avec et sans diversité en réception MRC. En outre, la performance du système est analysée lorsque la détection de spectre coopérative (CSS) est considérée sous diverses contraintes de canaux (par exemple, les canaux de communication parfaits et imparfaits). Les résultats numériques ont montré que la fiabilité de détection diminue à mesure que l'ordre n augmente et s’améliore sensiblement lorsque CSS emploie le schéma MRC. Il est démontré que CSS avec le schéma MRC maintient la probabilité de fausse alarme minimale dans les canaux d’information imparfaite plutôt que d'augmenter le nombre d'utilisateurs en coopération. Enfin, nous présentons une nouvelle approche pour l'analyse des performances des systèmes IVC sur n*canaux de Rayleigh, en utilisant n_T antennes d'émission et n_R antennes de réception pour lutter contre l'effet d’évanouissement. Dans ce contexte, nous évaluons la performance des systèmes MIMO-V2V basés sur la sélection des antennes d'émission avec un ratio maximum de combinaison (TAS/MRC) et la sélection combinant (TAS/SC). Dans cette étude, nous dérivons des expressions analytiques plus précises pour la probabilité de défaillance, la probabilité d'erreur de symbole, et l’évanouissement sur n*canaux Rayleigh. Il est montré que les deux régimes ont le même ordre de diversité maximale équivalent à (d≈mn_T n_R /n) . En outre, TAS / MRC offre un gain de performance mieux que TAS/ SC lorsque le nombre d'antennes de réception est plus que celle des antennes d’émission, mais l’amélioration de la performance est limitée lorsque n augmente.----------Abstract The purpose of intervehicular communication (IVC) systems is to enhance driving safety, in which vehicles use sensors and wireless communication techniques to talk to each other without any roadside intervention. Using these systems, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications can be more effective in avoiding accidents and traffic congestion than if each vehicle works individually. A potential solution can be implemented in this research area using cooperative communications systems which, in principle, increase spectral and power efficiency, network coverage, and reduce the outage probability. Antenna diversity (i.e., multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems) can also be an alternative solution for IVC systems to enhance channel capacity and diversity (reliability) but in exchange of an increased complexity. However, applying such solutions is challenging since wireless communications among vehicles is subject to harsh fading channels called ‘n*Rayleigh fading channels’, which leads to performance degradation. Therefore, in this thesis we provide a comprehensive performance analysis of cooperative transmission and MIMO systems over n*Rayleigh fading channels that help researchers for the design and implementation of V2V communication systems with lower complexity. Specifically, we first investigate the performance of cooperative IVC systems with relay selection over n*Rayleigh fading channels, assuming that both the decode-and-forward and the amplify-and-forward relaying protocols are achieved by N relays to transfer the source message to the destination. System performance is analyzed in terms of outage probability, symbol error probability, and average channel capacity. The numerical results have shown that the best relay selection approach achieves the diversity order of (d≈mN/n) where m is a cascaded Rayleigh fading parameter. Second, we investigate the performance of multihop-IVC systems with regenerative and non-regenerative relays. In this study, we derive approximate closed-form expressions for the outage probability and amount of fading when the maximum ratio combining (MRC) diversity reception is employed. Further, we analyze the power allocation for the underlying scheme in order to minimize the overall outage probability. We show that the performance of regenerative systems is better than that of non-regenerative systems when the cascading order n is low and they have similar performance when n is high. Third, we consider the problem of energy detection of unknown signals over n*Rayleigh fading channels. In this work, novel approximate expressions are derived for the average probability of detection with and without MRC diversity reception. Moreover, the system performance is analyzed when cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is considered under various channel constraints (e.g, perfect and imperfect reporting channels). The numerical results show that the detection reliability decreases as the cascading order n increases and substantially improves when CSS employs MRC schemes. It is demonstrated that CSS with MRC scheme keeps the probability of false alarm minimal under imperfect reporting channels rather than increasing the number of cooperative users. Finally, we present a new approach for the performance analysis of IVC systems over n*Rayleigh fading channels, using n_T transmit and n_R receive antennas to combat fading influence. In this context, we evaluate the performance of MIMO-V2V systems based on the transmit antenna selection with maximum ratio combining (TAS/MRC) and selection combining (TAS/SC) schemes. In this study, we derive tight analytical expressions for the outage probability, the symbol error probability, and the amount of fading over n*Rayleigh fading channels. It is shown that both schemes have the same maximum diversity order equivalent to (d≈mn_T n_R /n). In addition, TAS/MRC offers a better performance gain than TAS/SC scheme when the number of receive antennas is more than that of transmit antennas, but the performance improvement is limited as n increases

The history of WiMAX: a complete survey of the evolution in certification and standarization for IEEE 802.16 and WiMAX

Most researchers are familiar with the technical features of WiMAX technology but the evolution that WiMAX went through, in terms of standardization and certification, is missing and unknown to most people. Knowledge of this historical process would however aid to understand how WiMAX has become the widespread technology that it is today. Furthermore, it would give insight in the steps to undertake for anyone aiming at introducing a new wireless technology on a worldwide scale. Therefore, this article presents a survey on all relevant activities that took place within three important organizations: the 802.16 Working Group of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for technology development and standardization, the WiMAX Forum for product certification and the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) for international recognition. An elaborated and comprehensive overview of all those activities is given, which reveals the importance of the willingness to innovate and to continuously incorporate new ideas in the IEEE standardization process and the importance of the WiMAX Forum certification label granting process to ensure interoperability. We also emphasize the steps that were taken in cooperating with the ITU to improve the international esteem of the technology. Finally, a WiMAX trend analysis is made. We showed how industry interest has fluctuated over time and quantified the evolution in WiMAX product certification and deployments. It is shown that most interest went to the 2.5 GHz and 3.5GHz frequencies, that most deployments are in geographic regions with a lot of developing countries and that the highest people coverage is achieved in Asia Pacific. This elaborated description of all standardization and certification activities, from the very start up to now, will make the reader comprehend how past and future steps are taken in the development process of new WiMAX features

Recent Advances in Cellular D2D Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications have attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in recent years. It is a promising technique for offloading local traffic from cellular base stations by allowing local devices, in physical proximity, to communicate directly with each other. Furthermore, through relaying, D2D is also a promising approach to enhancing service coverage at cell edges or in black spots. However, there are many challenges to realizing the full benefits of D2D. For one, minimizing the interference between legacy cellular and D2D users operating in underlay mode is still an active research issue. With the 5th generation (5G) communication systems expected to be the main data carrier for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm, the potential role of D2D and its scalability to support massive IoT devices and their machine-centric (as opposed to human-centric) communications need to be investigated. New challenges have also arisen from new enabling technologies for D2D communications, such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and blockchain technologies, which call for new solutions to be proposed. This edited book presents a collection of ten chapters, including one review and nine original research works on addressing many of the aforementioned challenges and beyond

A Simple and Robust Dissemination Protocol for VANETs

Several promising applications for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) exist. For most of these applications, the communication among vehicles is envisioned to be based on the broadcasting of messages. This is due to the inherent highly mobile environment and importance of these messages to vehicles nearby. To deal with broadcast communication, dissemination protocols must be defined in such a way as to (i) prevent the so-called broadcast storm problem in dense networks and (ii) deal with disconnected networks in sparse topologies. In this paper, we present a Simple and Robust Dissemination (SRD) protocol that deals with these requirements in both sparse and dense networks. Its novelty lies in its simplicity and robustness. Simplicity is achieved by considering only two states (cluster tail and non- tail) for a vehicle. Robustness is achieved by assigning message delivery responsibility to multiple vehicles in sparse networks. Our simulation results show that SRD achieves high delivery ratio and low end-to-end delay under diverse traffic conditions

Medium Access Control, Packet Routing, and Internet Gateway Placement in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Road accidents represent a serious social problem and are one of the leading causes of human death and disability on a global scale. To reduce the risk and severity of a road accident, a variety of new safety applications can be realized through wireless communications among vehicles driving nearby each other, or among vehicles and especially deployed road side units (RSUs), a technology known as a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). Most of the VANET-enabled safety applications are based on broadcasting of safety messages by vehicles or RSUs, either periodically or in case of an unexpected event, such as a hard brake or dangerous road condition detection. Each broadcast safety message should be successfully delivered to the surrounding vehicles and RSUs without any excess delay, which is one of the main functions of a medium access control (MAC) protocol proposed for VANETs. This thesis presents VeMAC, a new multichannel time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol specifically designed to support the high priority safety applications in a VANET scenario. The ability of the VeMAC protocol to deliver periodic and event-driven safety messages in VANETs is demonstrated by a detailed delivery delay analysis, including queueing and service delays, for both types of safety messages. As well, computer simulations are conducted by using MATLAB, the network simulator ns-2, and the microscopic vehicle traffic simulator VISSIM, in order to evaluate the performance of the VeMAC protocol, in comparison with the IEEE 802.11p standard and the ADHOC MAC protocol (another TDMA protocol proposed for ad hoc networks). A real city scenario is simulated and different performance metrics are evaluated, including the network goodput, protocol overhead, channel utilization, protocol fairness, probability of a transmission collision, and safety message delivery delay. It is shown that the VeMAC protocol considerably outperforms the existing MAC schemes, which have significant limitations in supporting VANET safety applications. In addition to enhancing road safety, in-vehicle Internet access is one of the main applications of VANETs, which aims at providing the vehicle passengers with a low-cost access to the Internet via on-road gateways. This thesis presents a new strategy for deploying Internet gateways on the roads, in order to minimize the total cost of gateway deployment, while ensuring that a vehicle can connect to an Internet gateway (using multihop communications) with a probability greater than a specified threshold. This cost minimization problem is formulated by using binary integer programming, and applied for optimal gateway placement in a real city scenario. To the best of our knowledge, no previous strategy for gateway deployment has considered the probability of multihop connectivity among the vehicles and the deployed gateways. In order to allow a vehicle to discover the existence of an Internet gateway and to communicate with the gateway via multihops, a novel data packet routing scheme is proposed based on the VeMAC protocol. The performance of this cross-layer design is evaluated for a multichannel VANET in a highway scenario, mainly in terms of the end-to-end packet delivery delay. The packet queueing at each relay vehicle is considered in the end-to-end delay analysis, and numerical results are presented to study the effect of various parameters, such as the vehicle density and the packet arrival rate, on the performance metrics. The proposed VeMAC protocol is a promising candidate for MAC in VANETs, which can realize many advanced safety applications to enhance the public safety standards and improve the safety level of drivers/passengers and pedestrians on roads. On the other hand, the proposed gateway placement strategy and packet routing scheme represent a strong step toward providing reliable and ubiquitous in-vehicle Internet connectivity

Distributed Artificial Intelligence Solution for D2D Communication in 5G Networks

Device to Device (D2D) Communication is one of the technology components of the evolving 5G architecture, as it promises improvements in energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, overall system capacity, and higher data rates. The above noted improvements in network performance spearheaded a vast amount of research in D2D, which have identified significant challenges that need to be addressed before realizing their full potential in emerging 5G Networks. Towards this end, this paper proposes the use of a distributed intelligent approach to control the generation of D2D networks. More precisely, the proposed approach uses Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) intelligent agents with extended capabilities (BDIx) to manage each D2D node independently and autonomously, without the help of the Base Station. The paper includes detailed algorithmic description for the decision of transmission mode, which maximizes the data rate, minimizes the power consumptions, while taking into consideration the computational load. Simulations show the applicability of BDI agents in jointly solving D2D challenges.Comment: 10 pages,9 figure