Unified Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks, Doctoral Dissertation, August 2006

Radio power management is of paramount concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that must achieve long lifetimes on scarce amount of energy. Previous work has treated communication and sensing separately, which is insufficient for a common class of sensor networks that must satisfy both sensing and communication requirements. Furthermore, previous approaches focused on reducing energy consumption in individual radio states resulting in suboptimal solutions. Finally, existing power management protocols often assume simplistic models that cannot accurately reflect the sensing and communication properties of real-world WSNs. We develop a unified power management approach to address these issues. We first analyze the relationship between sensing and communication performance of WSNs. We show that sensing coverage often leads to good network connectivity and geographic routing performance, which provides insights into unified power management under both sensing and communication performance requirements. We then develop a novel approach called Minimum Power Configuration that ingegrates the power consumption in different radio states into a unified optimization framework. Finally, we develop two power management protocols that account for realistic communication and sensing properties of WSNs. Configurable Topology Control can configure a network topology to achieve desired path quality in presence of asymmetric and lossy links. Co-Grid is a coverage maintenance protocol that adopts a probabilistic sensing model. Co-Grid can satisfy desirable sensing QoS requirements (i.e., detection probability and false alarm rate) based on a distributed data fusion model

On the space requirement of interval routing

Interval routing is a space-efficient method for point-to-point networks. It is based on labeling the edges of a network with intervals of vertex numbers (called interval labels). An M-label scheme allows up to M labels to be attached on an edge. For arbitrary graphs of size n, n the number of vertices, the problem is to determine the minimum M necessary for achieving optimality in the length of the longest routing path. The longest routing path resulted from a labeling is an important indicator of the performance of any algorithm that runs on the network. We prove that there exists a graph with D = Ω(n1/3) such that if M ≤ n/18D - O(√n/D), the longest path is no shorter than D + Θ(D/√M). As a result, for any M-label IRS, if the longest path is to be shorter than D + Θ(D/√M), at least M = Ω(n/D) labels per edge would be necessary.published_or_final_versio

Localized and Configurable Topology Control in Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent empirical studies revealed that multi-hop wireless networks like wireless sensor networks and 802.11 mesh networks are inherently lossy. This finding introduces important new challenges for topology control. Existing topology control schemes often aim at maintaining network connectivity that cannot guarantee satisfactory path quality and communication performance when underlying links are lossy. In this paper, we present a localized algorithm, called Configurable Topology Control (CTC), that can configure a network topology to different provable quality levels (quantified by worst-case dilation bounds in terms of expected total number of transmisssions) required by applications. Each node running CTC computes its transmission power solely based on the link quality information collected within its local neighborhood and does not assume that the neighbor locations or communication ranges are known. Our simulations based on a realistic radio model of Mica2 motes show that CTC yields configurable communication performance and outperforms existing topology control algorithms that do not account for lossy links

Low-Congestion Shortcut and Graph Parameters

Distributed graph algorithms in the standard CONGEST model often exhibit the time-complexity lower bound of Omega~(sqrt{n} + D) rounds for many global problems, where n is the number of nodes and D is the diameter of the input graph. Since such a lower bound is derived from special "hard-core" instances, it does not necessarily apply to specific popular graph classes such as planar graphs. The concept of low-congestion shortcuts is initiated by Ghaffari and Haeupler [SODA2016] for addressing the design of CONGEST algorithms running fast in restricted network topologies. Specifically, given a specific graph class X, an f-round algorithm of constructing shortcuts of quality q for any instance in X results in O~(q + f)-round algorithms of solving several fundamental graph problems such as minimum spanning tree and minimum cut, for X. The main interest on this line is to identify the graph classes allowing the shortcuts which are efficient in the sense of breaking O~(sqrt{n}+D)-round general lower bounds. In this paper, we consider the relationship between the quality of low-congestion shortcuts and three major graph parameters, chordality, diameter, and clique-width. The main contribution of the paper is threefold: (1) We show an O(1)-round algorithm which constructs a low-congestion shortcut with quality O(kD) for any k-chordal graph, and prove that the quality and running time of this construction is nearly optimal up to polylogarithmic factors. (2) We present two algorithms, each of which constructs a low-congestion shortcut with quality O~(n^{1/4}) in O~(n^{1/4}) rounds for graphs of D=3, and that with quality O~(n^{1/3}) in O~(n^{1/3}) rounds for graphs of D=4 respectively. These results obviously deduce two MST algorithms running in O~(n^{1/4}) and O~(n^{1/3}) rounds for D=3 and 4 respectively, which almost close the long-standing complexity gap of the MST construction in small-diameter graphs originally posed by Lotker et al. [Distributed Computing 2006]. (3) We show that bounding clique-width does not help the construction of good shortcuts by presenting a network topology of clique-width six where the construction of MST is as expensive as the general case

Asymptotically Optimal Approximation Algorithms for Coflow Scheduling

Many modern datacenter applications involve large-scale computations composed of multiple data flows that need to be completed over a shared set of distributed resources. Such a computation completes when all of its flows complete. A useful abstraction for modeling such scenarios is a {\em coflow}, which is a collection of flows (e.g., tasks, packets, data transmissions) that all share the same performance goal. In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for scheduling coflows over general network topologies with the objective of minimizing total weighted completion time. We consider two different models for coflows based on the nature of individual flows: circuits, and packets. We design constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithms for scheduling packet-based coflows with or without given flow paths, and circuit-based coflows with given flow paths. Furthermore, we give an $O(\log n/\log \log n)$-approximation polynomial time algorithm for scheduling circuit-based coflows where flow paths are not given (here $n$ is the number of network edges). We obtain our results by developing a general framework for coflow schedules, based on interval-indexed linear programs, which may extend to other coflow models and objective functions and may also yield improved approximation bounds for specific network scenarios. We also present an experimental evaluation of our approach for circuit-based coflows that show a performance improvement of at least 22% on average over competing heuristics.Comment: Fixed minor typo

Aspects of k-k-Routing in Meshes and OTIS Networks

Aspects of k-k Routing in Meshes and OTIS-Networks Abstract Efficient data transport in parallel computers build on sparse interconnection networks is crucial for their performance. A basic transport problem in such a computer is the k-k routing problem. In this thesis, aspects of the k-k routing problem on r-dimensional meshes and OTIS-G networks are discussed. The first oblivious routing algorithms for these networks are presented that solve the k-k routing problem in an asymptotically optimal running time and a constant buffer size. Furthermore, other aspects of the k-k routing problem for OTIS-G networks are analysed. In particular, lower bounds for the problem based on the diameter and bisection width of OTIS-G networks are given, and the k-k sorting problem on the OTIS-Mesh is considered. Based on OTIS-G networks, a new class of networks, called Extended OTIS-G networks, is introduced, which have smaller diameters than OTIS-G networks.Für die Leistungfähigkeit von Parallelrechnern, die über ein Verbindungsnetzwerk kommunizieren, ist ein effizienter Datentransport entscheidend. Ein grundlegendes Transportproblem in einem solchen Rechner ist das k-k Routing Problem. In dieser Arbeit werden Aspekte dieses Problems in r-dimensionalen Gittern und OTIS-G Netzwerken untersucht. Es wird der erste vergessliche (oblivious) Routing Algorithmus vorgestellt, der das k-k Routing Problem in diesen Netzwerken in einer asymptotisch optimalen Laufzeit bei konstanter Puffergröße löst. Für OTIS-G Netzwerke werden untere Laufzeitschranken für das untersuchte Problem angegeben, die auf dem Durchmesser und der Bisektionsweite der Netzwerke basieren. Weiterhin wird ein Algorithmus vorgestellt, der das k-k Sorting Problem mit einer Laufzeit löst, die nahe an der Bisektions- und Durchmesserschranke liegt. Basierend auf den OTIS-G Netzwerken, wird eine neue Klasse von Netzwerken eingeführt, die sogenannten Extended OTIS-G Netzwerke, die sich durch einen kleineren Durchmesser von OTIS-G Netzwerken unterscheiden

Oriented Spanners

Given a point set $P$ in the Euclidean plane and a parameter $t$, we define an \emph{oriented $t$-spanner} as an oriented subgraph of the complete bi-directed graph such that for every pair of points, the shortest cycle in $G$ through those points is at most a factor $t$ longer than the shortest oriented cycle in the complete bi-directed graph. We investigate the problem of computing sparse graphs with small oriented dilation. As we can show that minimising oriented dilation for a given number of edges is NP-hard in the plane, we first consider one-dimensional point sets. While obtaining a $1$-spanner in this setting is straightforward, already for five points such a spanner has no plane embedding with the leftmost and rightmost point on the outer face. This leads to restricting to oriented graphs with a one-page book embedding on the one-dimensional point set. For this case we present a dynamic program to compute the graph of minimum oriented dilation that runs in $O(n^8)$ time for $n$ points, and a greedy algorithm that computes a $5$-spanner in $O(n\log n)$ time. Expanding these results finally gives us a result for two-dimensional point sets: we prove that for convex point sets the greedy triangulation results in an oriented $O(1)$-spanner.Comment: conference version: ESA '2