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 others’ 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 applications’ 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

Review of multicast QoS routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is consisting of a collection of wireless mobile nodes, which form a temporary network without relying on any existing infrastructure or centralized administration. Since the bandwidth of MANETs is limited and shared between the participating nodes in the network, it is important to efficiently utilize the network bandwidth. Multicasting can minimize the link bandwidth consumption and reduce the communication cost by sending the same data to multiple participants. Multicast service is critical for applications that need collaboration of team of users. Multicasting in MANETs becomes a hot research area due to the increasing popularity of group communication applications such as video conferencing and interactive television. Recently, multimedia and group-oriented computing gains more popularity for users of ad hoc networks. So, effective Quality of Service (QoS) multicasting protocol plays significant role in MANETs. In this paper, we are presenting an overview of set of the most recent QoS multicast routing protocols that have been proposed in order to provide the researchers with a clear view of what has been done in this field

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

A Remote Capacity Utilization Estimator for WLANs

In WLANs, the capacity of a node is not fixed and can vary dramatically due to the shared nature of the medium under the IEEE 802.11 MAC mechanism. There are two main methods of capacity estimation in WLANs: Active methods based upon probing packets that consume the bandwidth of the channel and do not scale well. Passive methods based upon analyzing the transmitted packets that avoid the overhead of transmitting probe packets and perform with greater accuracy. Furthermore, passive methods can be implemented locally or remotely. Local passive methods require an additional dissemination mechanism in order to communicate the capacity information to other network nodes which adds complexity and can be unreliable under adverse network conditions. On the other hand, remote passive methods do not require a dissemination mechanism and so can be simpler to implement and also do not suffer from communication reliability issues. Many applications (e.g. ANDSF etc) can benefit from utilizing this capacity information. Therefore, in this thesis we propose a new remote passive Capacity Utilization estimator performed by neighbour nodes. However, there will be an error associated with the measurements owing to the differences in the wireless medium as observed by the different nodes’ location. The main undertaking of this thesis is to address this issue. An error model is developed to analyse the main sources of error and to determine their impact on the accuracy of the estimator. Arising from this model, a number of modifications are implemented to improve the accuracy of the estimator. The network simulator ns2 is used to investigate the performance of the estimator and the results from a range of different test scenarios indicate its feasibility and accuracy as a passive remote method. Finally, the estimator is deployed in a node saturation detection scheme where it is shown to outperform two other similar schemes based upon queue observation and probing with ping packets

A Survey of Network Optimization Techniques for Traffic Engineering

TCP/IP represents the reference standard for the implementation of interoperable communication networks. Nevertheless, the layering principle at the basis of interoperability severely limits the performance of data communication networks, thus requiring proper configuration and management in order to provide effective management of traffic flows. This paper presents a brief survey related to network optimization using Traffic Engineering algorithms, aiming at providing additional insight to the different alternatives available in the scientific literature

On-demand Bandwidth and Stability Based Unicast Routing in Mobile Adhoc Networks

Characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) such as lack of central coordination, dynamic topology and limited resources pose a challenging problem in quality of service (QoS) routing. Providing an efficient, robust and low overhead QoS unicast route from source to destination is a critical issue. Bandwidth and route stability are the major important QoS parameters for applications where long duration connections are required with stringent bandwidth requirements for multimedia applications. This paper proposes an On-demand Bandwidth and Stability based Unicast Routing scheme (OBSUR) in MANET by adding additional QoS features to existing Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The objective of the OBSUR is to provide QoS satisfied, reliable and robust route for communicating nodes. The scheme works in following steps. (1) Each node in the network periodically (small regular intervals) estimates bandwidth availability, node and link stability, buffer availability, and stability factor between nodes. (2) Construction of neighbor stability and QoS database at every node which is used in route establishment process. (3) The unicast path is constructed by using route request and route reply packets with the help of route information cache, and (4) route maintenance in case of node mobility and route failures. Simulation results show that there is an improvement in terms of traffic admission ratio, control overhead, packet delivery ratio, end to end delay and throughput as compared to Route Stability Based QoS Routing (RSQR) in MANETs.

HWN* Mobility Management Considering QoS, Optimisation and Cross Layer Issues

In this paper, we address mobility management for 4th generation heterogeneous networks from a quality of service (QoS), optimisation and cross layer design perspective. Users are classified as high profile, normal profile and low profile according to their differentiated service requirements. Congestion avoidance control and adaptive handover mechanisms are implemented for efficient cooperation within the mobile heterogeneous network environment consisting of a TDMA network, ad hoc network and relay nodes. A previous proposed routing algorithm is also revised to include mobility management