HARD: Hybrid Adaptive Resource Discovery for Jungle Computing

In recent years, Jungle Computing has emerged as a distributed computing paradigm based on simultaneous combination of various hierarchical and distributed computing environments which are composed by large number of heterogeneous resources. In such a computing environment, the resources and the underlying computation and communication infrastructures are highly-hierarchical and heterogeneous. This creates a lot of difficulty and complexity for finding the proper resources in a precise way in order to run a particular job on the system efficiently. This paper proposes Hybrid Adaptive Resource Discovery (HARD), a novel efficient and highly scalable resource-discovery approach which is built upon a virtual hierarchical overlay based on self-organization and self-adaptation of processing resources in the system, where the computing resources are organized into distributed hierarchies according to a proposed hierarchical multi-layered resource description model. The proposed approach supports distributed query processing within and across hierarchical layers by deploying various distributed resource discovery services and functionalities in the system which are implemented using different adapted algorithms and mechanisms in each level of hierarchy. The proposed approach addresses the requirements for resource discovery in Jungle Computing environments such as high-hierarchy, high-heterogeneity, high-scalability and dynamicity. Simulation results show significant scalability and efficiency of the proposed approach over highly heterogeneous, hierarchical and dynamic computing environments

Research on network anycast

Anycast is defined as a service in IPv6, which provides stateless best effort delivery of an anycast datagram to at least one, and preferably only one host. It is a topic of increasing interest. This paper is an attempt to gather and report on the work done on anycast. There are two main categories at present: network-layer anycast and application-layer anycast. Both involve anycast architectures, routing algorithms, metrics, applications, etc. We also present an efficient algorithm for application-layer anycast, and point out possible research directions based on our research. <br /

A COMMUNICATION FRAMEWORK FOR MULTIHOP WIRELESS ACCESS AND SENSOR NETWORKS: ANYCAST ROUTING & SIMULATION TOOLS

The reliance on wireless networks has grown tremendously within a number of varied application domains, prompting an evolution towards the use of heterogeneous multihop network architectures. We propose and analyze two communication frameworks for such networks. A first framework is designed for communications within multihop wireless access networks. The framework supports dynamic algorithms for locating access points using anycast routing with multiple metrics and balancing network load. The evaluation shows significant performance improvement over traditional solutions. A second framework is designed for communication within sensor networks and includes lightweight versions of our algorithms to fit the limitations of sensor networks. Analysis shows that this stripped down version can work almost equally well if tailored to the needs of a sensor network. We have also developed an extensive simulation environment using NS-2 to test realistic situations for the evaluations of our work. Our tools support analysis of realistic scenarios including the spreading of a forest fire within an area, and can easily be ported to other simulation software. Lastly, we us our algorithms and simulation environment to investigate sink movements optimization within sensor networks. Based on these results, we propose strategies, to be addressed in follow-on work, for building topology maps and finding optimal data collection points. Altogether, the communication framework and realistic simulation tools provide a complete communication and evaluation solution for access and sensor networks

Energy-Efficient Boarder Node Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper introduces the design, implementation, and performance analysis of the scalable and mobility-aware hybrid protocol named boarder node medium access control (BN-MAC) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which leverages the characteristics of scheduled and contention-based MAC protocols. Like contention-based MAC protocols, BN-MAC achieves high channel utilization, network adaptability under heavy traffic and mobility, and low latency and overhead. Like schedule-based MAC protocols, BN-MAC reduces idle listening time, emissions, and collision handling at low cost at one-hop neighbor nodes and achieves high channel utilization under heavy network loads. BN-MAC is particularly designed for region-wise WSNs. Each region is controlled by a boarder node (BN), which is of paramount importance. The BN coordinates with the remaining nodes within and beyond the region. Unlike other hybrid MAC protocols, BN-MAC incorporates three promising models that further reduce the energy consumption, idle listening time, overhearing, and congestion to improve the throughput and reduce the latency. One of the models used with BN-MAC is automatic active and sleep (AAS), which reduces the ideal listening time. When nodes finish their monitoring process, AAS lets them automatically go into the sleep state to avoid the idle listening state. Another model used in BN-MAC is the intelligent decision-making (IDM) model, which helps the nodes sense the nature of the environment. Based on the nature of the environment, the nodes decide whether to use the active or passive mode. This decision power of the nodes further reduces energy consumption because the nodes turn off the radio of the transceiver in the passive mode. The third model is the least-distance smart neighboring search (LDSNS), which determines the shortest efficient path to the one-hop neighbor and also provides cross-layering support to handle the mobility of the nodes. The BN-MAC also incorporates a semi-synchronous feature with a low duty cycle, which is advantageous for reducing the latency and energy consumption for several WSN application areas to improve the throughput. BN-MAC uses a unique window slot size to enhance the contention resolution issue for improved throughput. BN-MAC also prefers to communicate within a one-hop destination using Anycast, which maintains load balancing to maintain network reliability. BN-MAC is introduced with the goal of supporting four major application areas: monitoring and behavioral areas, controlling natural disasters, human-centric applications, and tracking mobility and static home automation devices from remote places. These application areas require a congestion-free mobility-supported MAC protocol to guarantee reliable data delivery. BN-MAC was evaluated using network simulator-2 (ns2) and compared with other hybrid MAC protocols, such as Zebra medium access control (Z-MAC), advertisement-based MAC (A-MAC), Speck-MAC, adaptive duty cycle SMAC (ADC-SMAC), and low-power real-time medium access control (LPR-MAC). The simulation results indicate that BN-MAC is a robust and energy-efficient protocol that outperforms other hybrid MAC protocols in the context of quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as energy consumption, latency, throughput, channel access time, successful delivery rate, coverage efficiency, and average duty cycle.https://doi.org/10.3390/s14030507