Mesh networks for handheld mobile devices

Mesh communications emerge today as a very popular networking solution. Mesh networks have a decentralized and multihop design. These characteristics arouse interest in research for relevant novel features, such as cooperation among nodes, distribution of tasks, scalability, communication with limited infrastructure support, and the support of mobile devices as mesh nodes. In addition to the inexistence of a solution that implements mesh networks with mobile devices at the data link layer (Layer 2), there is also a need to reconsider existing metrics with new information to tackle the intrinsic characteristics of mobile devices, e.g., the limited energy resources of their battery. To tackle this problem, this thesis presents a detailed study about projects, routing protocols and metrics developed in the area of mesh networks. In addition, two data link layer solutions, Open802.11s and B.A.T.M.A.N-advanced, have been adapted and deployed in a real mesh network testbed with off the shelf routers devices installed with a customized operating system. From this testbed, Open802.11s has proved to offer better performance than B.A.T.M.A.N-advanced. Following this, a breakthrough in this work has been the integration of the 802.11s on an Android mobile device and its subsequent incorporation in the mesh network. This allowed the study of eventual limitations imposed by the mobile device on the operation of the mesh network, namely performance and energy scarcity. With this, another major novelty has followed, by designing, implementing and evaluating several energy related metrics regarding the battery status of mobile devices. This has enabled the participation of mobile devices in mesh routing paths in an efficient way. Our main objective was to implement a mesh network with mobile devices. This has been achieved and validated through the evaluation of diverse testing scenarios performed in a real mesh testbed. The obtained results also show that the operation of a mesh with mobile devices can be enhanced, including the lifetime of mobile devices, when an energy-aware metric is used.As redes mesh surgem hoje em dia como uma solução de rede em crescimento e expansão. Neste tipo de redes o comportamento entre os nós é descentralizado e numa topologia de multihop. Estas características despertam interesse na pesquisa e desenvolvimento de novas funcionalidades tais como: cooperação entre nós, distribuição de tarefas, escalabilidade da rede e comunicações mesmo em casos de uma infraestrutura limitada e o suporte de dispositivos móveis como nós de uma rede mesh. Associado à inexistência de um projecto que implemente redes mesh em dispositivos móveis na camada de ligação de dados (Layer 2), surge a necessidade de repensar as métricas já existentes com novas informações que façam face às novas características dos dispositivos móveis, neste caso, os recursos limitados de bateria. Por forma a resolver este problema, este trabalho apresenta um estudo detalhado sobre os projetos, protocolos de routing e métricas desenvolvidas na área das redes mesh. Além disso, duas soluções que utilizam a camada de ligação de dados, Open802.11s e BATMAN-advanced, estes foram adaptadao e implementados num testbed real utilizando routers com um sistema operacional costumizado instalado. Deste testbed, concluiu-se que o Open802.11s obtem um melhor desempenho que o BATMAN-advanced. Assim, um dos avanços deste trabalho foi a integração do Open802.11s num dispositivo móvel Android e sua posterior incorporação na rede mesh. Isto permitiu o estudo de eventuais limitações impostas pelo dispositivo móvel ao funcionar numa rede mesh, ou seja, desempenho e a escassez de energia. Com isso, foi concebida outra novidade, através da concepção, avaliação e implementação de várias métricas relacionadas com a energia e que têm por base o estado da bateria do dispositivo. Isto permitiu que os dispositivos móveis participem na rede mesh e a sua gestão de bateria seja feita de forma eficiente. O principal objectivo era a implementação de uma rede mesh com dispositivos móveis. Este foi alcançado e validado através de diversos cenários de teste reais. Os resultados obtidos demonstram também que o funcionamento de uma rede mesh com dispositivos móveis pode ser melhorada, incluindo o tempo de vida dos dispositivos móveis, quando uma métrica que considera a energia é utilizada

Situation-aware routing for wireless mesh networks with mobile nodes

Magister Scientiae - MScThis thesis demonstrates that a situation-aware algorithm improves quality of service on small mesh networks running BATMAN-adv with some mobile nodes. BATMAN-adv is a proactive mesh routing protocol that counts beacons as a link quality metric. BATMAN-adv was modi ed to give more recently received beacons more weight, thereby calculating a more precise indication of the current state of a link that BATMAN-adv can use to forward packets. BATMAN-adv `original' was compared with a situation-aware version in two laboratory test beds with the same voice traffic profile on actual hardware with a realistic voice traffic profile; with controlled transmission rates and buffer sizes to simulate congestion. The second test bed included mesh potatoes, PCs and laptops as mobile nodes. BATMAN-adv achieved better jitter and packet loss than the situation-aware version in the initial, smaller test bed, and average throughput for both versions was almost identical. However, in the second slightly larger test bed, with additional mobile nodes, the situation-aware algorithm performed better than the original BATMAN-adv algorithm for all quality of service metrics, including throughput. Thus the thesis concludes that a situation-aware protocol offers a promising solution to address issues pertaining to mobility, congestion and scalability for voice traffic in mesh networks with mobile nodes.South Afric

Top Level Mesh

This paper will cover our report on the Top Level Mesh. We have built a web-based system for mesh network management. This system allows network utilities to be used from a web-based interface to monitor and manage the transfer of data. The system runs primarily on Raspberry Pis using Raspbian Linux. Users can access the system through web browsers to both configure the system and interact with the data on the network. We discuss our motivation for the project, design decisions made, technologies used and more throughout this report. We conclude with some lessons learned and future work to be done

Wifi mesh network nodes on guifi.net

Aquest estudi presenta la situacio actual de la comunitat sense fils lliure i oberta anomenada guifi.net, la seva historia i els seus reptes de futur. L'estudi s'orienta particularment a les xarxes sense fils en mode mesh, que ultimament ha estat en clar creixement a la comunitat. En concret, s'estudia el rendiment dels tres protocols d'enrutament mes utilitzats en aquest tipus de xarxa, B.A.T.M.A.N., BMX i OLSR. Durant la realitzacio d'aquest estudi s'ha utilitzat un dels CPE mes utilitzats actualment, l'Ubiquiti NanoStation 2, utilitzat basicament pel seu preu i mida, i amb el qual voldrem esbrinar si es adequat pel tipus de xarxa mesh. Per tot aixo, es compilara una versio particular del firmware OpenWRT i es generara trafic real per analitzar-ne el rendiment

Approximating optimal Broadcast in Wireless Mesh Networks with Machine Learning

With the growth of IoT, efficient broadcast is required for many applications. Yet, current protocols use primitive mechanisms based on heuristics. Multi-agent reinforcement learning is applied to approximate optimal broadcast in Wireless Mesh Networks. One of the proposed fully distributed algorithms, using Bayesian Neural Networks, outperforms MORE multicast and BATMAN, improving airtime up to 20%, e2e delay up to 30%, and satisfying timeout constraints in over the 97% of the cases

Packet aggregation for voice over internet protocol on wireless mesh networks

>Magister Scientiae - MScThis thesis validates that packet aggregation is a viable technique to increase call ca-pacity for Voice over Internet Protocol over wireless mesh networks. Wireless mesh networks are attractive ways to provide voice services to rural communities. Due to the ad-hoc routing nature of mesh networks, packet loss and delay can reduce voice quality.Even on non-mesh networks, voice quality is reduced by high overhead, associated with the transmission of multiple small packets. Packet aggregation techniques are proven to increase VoIP performance and thus can be deployed in wireless mesh networks. Kernel level packet aggregation was initially implemented and tested on a small mesh network of PCs running Linux, and standard baseline vs. aggregation tests were conducted with a realistic voice tra c pro le in hop-to-hop mode. Modi cations of the kernel were then transferred to either end of a nine node 'mesh potato' network and those tests were conducted with only the end nodes modi ed to perform aggregation duties. Packet ag- gregation increased call capacity expectedly, while quality of service was maintained in both instances, and hop-to-hop aggregation outperformed the end-to-end con guration. However, implementing hop-to-hop in a scalable fashion is prohibitive, due to the extensive kernel level debugging that must be done to achieve the call capacity increase.Therefore, end-to-end call capacity increase is an acceptable compromise for eventual scalable deployment of voice over wireless mesh networks

BATSEN: Modifying the BATMAN Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The proliferation of autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has spawned research seeking power efficient communications to improve the lifetime of sensor motes. WSNs are characterized by their power limitations, wireless transceivers, and the converge-cast communications techniques. WSN motes use low-power, lossy radio systems deployed in dense, random topologies, working sympathetically to sense and notify a sink node of the detectable information. In an effort to extend the life of battery powered motes, and hence the life of the network, various routing protocols have been suggested in an effort to optimize converge-cast delivery of sensor data. It is well known that reducing the overhead required to perform converge-cast routing and communications reduces the effects of the primary power drain in the mote, the transceiver. Furthermore, WSNs are not well protected; network security costs energy both in computation and in RF transmission. This paper investigates the use of a Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (MANET) routing protocol known as B.A.T.M.A.N. in WSN. This thesis proposes that the features of B.A.T.M.A.N. in the MANET realm may prove beneficial to the WSN routing domain; and that slight modifications to the routing technique may prove beneficial beyond current protocol technologies. The B.A.T.M.A.N. variant will be compared against the contemporary LEACH WSN routing protocol to discern any potential energy savings

Routing Protocols for Meshed Communication, Networks Targeting Communication Quality of Service (QoS) in Rural Areas

Rural areas in Africa often have poor telecommunication infrastructure. Mobile phones, if available, are frequently unaffordable to most users. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) offer an alternative possibility of low cost voice and data communications. The focus of this research is a laboratory study of WMNs that mimic conditions found in rural areas. This work investigates routing strategies for the Mesh Potato (MP). The MP is an effective alternative communication technology that has minimal configuration requirements, low cost of deployment, low power consumption and resilience that make it an attractive choice for rural areas. The MP runs a new mesh networking algorithm called the better approach to mobile ad hoc networking (B.A.T.M.A.N or Batman). This allows a WMN to be established in which users can use plain old telephones to talk to each other using Voice over IP (VoIP). Batman daemon (Batmand) is the implementation of Batman algorithm used by the MP. Batmand is a minimalistic routing protocol which performs well in laboratory experiments. The question raised is whether adding more service specific routing metrics improve the quality of service (QoS) observed in Batmand network in practice. The research investigates delay, packet loss, throughput and jitter as performance parameters (metrics) that may serve as options to improve the simplistic Batman algorithms route selection process. These metrics are essential for QoS in voice- and data-sensitive networks. Specific focus was given to delay and it is the metric added to Batmand. In addition the research examines how well the different applications such as voice and data are supported on the Batmand network under different routing scenarios. The research approach adopted in this dissertation was experimental and an indoor testbed was created to replicate the basic scenarios encountered in the rural environment. The essential characteristics found in the Mdumbi region of the Eastern Cape, South Africa, were taken as a case study in this dissertation. The testbed was used to compare the original Batman algorithm implemented as Batmand, referred to here as O-Batmand, routing protocol and the resultant Batmand version obtained from the addition of the delay-routing metric called modified Batmand (M-Batmand). The research produced a number of findings. As the number of hops increased the per-formance of the network decreased for both protocols. O-Batmand is well suited for the task of routing packets inside a wireless network. It is designed and works for voice packets and supports data services. This is also true for the M-Batmand implementation. M-Batmand was developed as an improvement to the O-Batmand implementation at the cost of increased complexity, experienced by the protocol through modifications of its route selection process. The modification involved adding network delay values to its route selection process. This addition resulted in a protocol that is delay sensitive; however, the overall performance gains were inexistent. The main conclusions drawn from this study are that O-Batmand cannot be modified to include additional metrics and be expected to improve its performance. Second conclusion is that M-Batmand did not improve the overall performance of the O-Batmand protocol. The addition of the delay metric actually hindered O-Batmand's performance to the extent that no overall performance gains were realised. Sources of performance degradations are: increased overhead, from added delay data, in the network control packets called originator messages (OGMs). M-Batmand performs calculation which O-Batmand did not increasing CPU cycle needs. Lastly upon further internal protocol investigation it is seen that the rate of route delay data updates is slower than the original metric used by the protocol. This creates route fluctuations as route selection process will change when the updated delay values are added and change again when there are not as the network obtains the updated delay data. Both protocols support voice and data, however, the results show that the quality of the network deteriorates in the testbed with increasing hops. This affects voice more so then it does data as routes become more unstable with each increasing hop. Further Batmand is best at supporting voice and data as it outperforms M-Batmand in the laboratory experiments conducted. This dissertation argues that while there may exist one or a combination of metrics amongst the researched list (delay, packet loss, throughput and jitter) that may actually improve the performance of the protocol, it is extremely hard to realize such gains in practice

Em direção ao desenho de um módulo social-inspirado para a tomada de decisões dos nós de uma rede Ad Hoc

Este artículo presenta el estado del arte preparado en un proyecto de investigación que propone la construcción de un módulo de software en nodos inalámbricos que adquieran la capacidad de decidir sobre su ingreso (o no ingreso) a una red Ad Hoc, y sobre la cantidad de recursos que van a aportar a ella, si deciden entrar, considerando datos que le proporciona la red acerca de los recursos disponibles y la cantidad de nodos, y acerca de parámetros internos como CPU, disco duro y procesador, entre otros, mediante un modelo matemático de toma de decisiones. El módulo debe poder interactuar con un intérprete en un nivel inferior y una entidad de nivel superior que equivale a un sistema distribuido. La investigación está enmarcada en el Sistema de Cómputo del grupo TLÖN de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, el cual busca la aplicación de un paradigma social-inspirado en redes Ad Hoc.This article presents the state of the art derived from a research project where the construction of a software module related with the capability of the wireless nodes to decide whether or not to enter an ad hoc network, is proposed. If the decision is to enter, the amount of resources needed to provide the net is assessed by analyzing data provided for the network about the resources available and the number of nodes and internal parameters (CPU, hard disk, and processor, among others) through a mathematical model. The module developed should interact with an interpreter at a lower level and with a higher level entity, a distributed system. The research is supported by the computational system of the TLÖN group of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where its main purpose is to study the application of a social-inspired paradigm in ad hoc networks.Este artigo apresenta o estado da arte preparada em um projeto de pesquisa que propõe a construção de um módulo de software em nós sem fio que possam adquirir a capacidade de decidir sobre o seu ingresso (ou não ingresso) para uma rede ad hoc, e sobre a quantidade de recursos que irão somar à rede, se decidirem ingressar, considerando os dados fornecidos pela rede sobre os recursos disponíveis e o número de nós, e sobre os parâmetros internos, tais como CPU, disco rígido e processador, entre outros, através de um modelo matemático de tomada de decisões. O módulo deve ser capaz de interagir com um intérprete de nível inferior e uma entidade de nível superior equivalente a um sistema distribuído. A pesquisa está enquadrada no Sistema de Cômputo do grupo Tlön da Universidade Nacional de Colômbia, que visa a implementação de um paradigma social-inspirado em redes ad hoc