System Performance Analysis of Cooperative Communication in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks have been attracting more and more attentions in recent years from both academia and industry, because of their low deployment costs and broad applications. Due to the scarcity of the radio spectrum, supporting concurrent transmissions by exploiting the spatial frequency reuse gain is necessary to enhance spectrum utilization. On the other hand, cooperative communication is a practical technique for realizing the spatial diversity gain to mitigate the detrimental effect of wireless channel and enhance the transmission reliability. Enabling concurrent cooperative transmissions across a network can achieve both types of gains. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, the concurrent cooperative transmissions using the same radio channel generate interference to each other, which is the main performance-limiting factor. Accurate characterization of interference is a fundamental step towards evaluating the performance of cooperative communication in a wireless ad hoc network. However, the distributed network operation, random node locations, interference redistribution due to relay transmissions, and dynamic traffic arrival pose significant challenges in interference characterization. Under the protocol interference model, this thesis evaluates the effectiveness of cooperative communication in a wireless ad hoc network from a perspective of overall network performance through investigating the network throughput, which captures the tradeoff between single-link cooperation gain and network-wide reduced spatial frequency reuse due to relay transmissions. In particular, based on stochastic geometry, the outage probabilities of direct and cooperative transmissions are derived to characterize single-link cooperation gain. On the other hand, according to a randomized scheduling scheme, the expected numbers of concurrent direct and cooperative transmissions that can be accommodated within the network coverage area are calculated to characterize network-wide reduced spatial frequency reuse. The analytical results show that a locally beneficial cooperation decision is not guaranteed to be network-wide beneficial. The number of potential relays determines the achievable performance of a cooperative link, and varies for different source-destination pairs due to random relay locations. This thesis proposes an opportunistic cooperation strategy based on the number of potential relays available for each source-destination pair. Under the physical interference model, the correlation of node locations induces the correlation of interference power. Via modeling node locations as a Poisson point process (PPP) and based on the Campbell's theorem, the temporal correlation coefficient of interference power at a destination node is analyzed. In addition, we derive the outage probability of opportunistic cooperation while taking into account the spatial and temporal interference correlation. The overall network performance can be enhanced by adjusting the proportion of concurrent cooperative transmissions. In addition to random node locations and interference redistribution, dynamic traffic arrival further complicates the interference characterization. This thesis investigates the performance of cooperative communication in a wireless ad hoc network with unsaturated traffic, which introduces a correlation between the interferer density and packet retransmission probability. Based on queueing theory and stochastic geometry, the interference power is characterized from two aspects, namely stationary interferer density and interference correlation in two consecutive time-slots, to evaluate the network performance. The analytical results show that the performance analysis under the assumption of independent interference power overestimates the network performance. The proposed theoretical performance analysis framework provides a step towards better understanding of the benefits and limitations of cooperative communication in wireless ad hoc networks with spatially random nodes, and in turn provides useful insights on protocol design and parameter setting for large-scale networks.4 month

Mobile ad hoc networks for intelligent systems

Advances in wireless technology and portable computing along with demands for high user mobility have provided a major promotion toward the development of ad hoc networks. Mobile ad hoc networks feature dynamic topology, self-organization, limited bandwidth and battery power of a node. They do not rely on specialized routers for path discovery and traffic routing. Research on ad hoc networks has been extensively investigated in the past few years and related work has focused on many of the layers of the communications architecture. This research intends to investigate applications of MANET for intelligent systems, including intelligent transportation system (ITS), sensor network and mobile intelligent robot network, and propose some approaches to topology management, link layer multiple access and routing algorithms. Their performance is evaluated by theoretical analysis and off-the-shelf simulation tools. Most current research on ad hoc networks assumes the availability of IEEE 802.11. However, the RTS/CTS protocol of 802.11 still leads to packet collision which in turn decreases the network throughput and lifetime. For sensor networks, sensors are mostly battery operated. Hence, resolving packet collision may improve network lifetime by saving valuable power. Using space and network diversity combination, this work proposes a new packet separation approach to packet collision caused by masked nodes. Inter-vehicle communication is a key component of ITS and it is also called vehicular ad hoc network. VANET has many features different from regular MANETs in terms of mobility, network size and connectivity. Given rapid topology changes and network partitioning, this work studies how to organize the numerous vehicular nodes and establish message paths between any pair of vehicular nodes if they are not apart too far away. In urban areas, the inter-vehicle communication has different requirements and constraints than highway environments. The proposed position-based routing strategy for VANETs utilizes the traffic pattern in city environments. Packets are forwarded based on traffic lights timing sequence and the moving direction of relaying vehicles. A multicast protocol is also introduced to visualize the real time road traffic with customized scale. Only vehicles related to a source node\u27s planned trajectory will reply the query packet. The visualized real time traffic information therefore helps the driver make better decision in route planning when traffic congestion happens. Nowadays robots become more and more powerful and intelligent. They can take part in operations in a cooperative manner which makes distributed control necessary. Ad hoc robot communication network is still fresh field for researchers working on networking technology. This work investigates some key issues in robot ad hoc network and evaluate the challenges while establishing robot ad hoc networks

RECOMAC: a cross-layer cooperative network protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

A novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative protocol, namely, Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) is proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. The protocol architecture makes use of cooperative forwarding methods, in which coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, as RECOMAC spans the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers. Randomized coding is exploited at the physical layer to realize cooperative transmissions, and cooperative forwarding is implemented for routing functionality, which is submerged into the MAC layer, while the overhead for MAC and route set up is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements of eight times higher throughput and one tenth of end-to-end delay than that of the conventional architecture in practical wireless mesh networks

A cross layer multi hop network architecture for wireless Ad Hoc networks

In this paper, a novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture is presented. Our architecture involves the design of a simple yet efficient cooperative flooding scheme,two decentralized opportunistic cooperative forwarding mechanisms as well as the design of Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) protocol that spans and incorporates the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers for improving the performance of multihop communication. The proposed architecture exploits randomized coding at the physical layer to realize cooperative diversity. Randomized coding alleviates relay selection and actuation mechanisms,and therefore reduces the coordination among the relays. The coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, without communication among the relays and without establishing a prior route. In our architecture, routing layer functionality is submerged into the MAC layer to provide seamless cooperative communication while the messaging overhead to set up routes, select and actuate relays is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements, such as eight times higher throughput and ten times lower end-to-end delay as well as reduced overhead, as compared to networks based on well-known IEEE 802.11 and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols

Adoption of vehicular ad hoc networking protocols by networked robots

This paper focuses on the utilization of wireless networking in the robotics domain. Many researchers have already equipped their robots with wireless communication capabilities, stimulated by the observation that multi-robot systems tend to have several advantages over their single-robot counterparts. Typically, this integration of wireless communication is tackled in a quite pragmatic manner, only a few authors presented novel Robotic Ad Hoc Network (RANET) protocols that were designed specifically with robotic use cases in mind. This is in sharp contrast with the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). This observation is the starting point of this paper. If the results of previous efforts focusing on VANET protocols could be reused in the RANET domain, this could lead to rapid progress in the field of networked robots. To investigate this possibility, this paper provides a thorough overview of the related work in the domain of robotic and vehicular ad hoc networks. Based on this information, an exhaustive list of requirements is defined for both types. It is concluded that the most significant difference lies in the fact that VANET protocols are oriented towards low throughput messaging, while RANET protocols have to support high throughput media streaming as well. Although not always with equal importance, all other defined requirements are valid for both protocols. This leads to the conclusion that cross-fertilization between them is an appealing approach for future RANET research. To support such developments, this paper concludes with the definition of an appropriate working plan