Performance Analysis of On-Demand Routing Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have recently gained a lot of popularity due to their rapid deployment and instant communication capabilities. WMNs are dynamically self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing with the nodes in the network automatically establishing an adiej hoc network and preserving the mesh connectivity. Designing a routing protocol for WMNs requires several aspects to consider, such as wireless networks, fixed applications, mobile applications, scalability, better performance metrics, efficient routing within infrastructure, load balancing, throughput enhancement, interference, robustness etc. To support communication, various routing protocols are designed for various networks (e.g. ad hoc, sensor, wired etc.). However, all these protocols are not suitable for WMNs, because of the architectural differences among the networks. In this paper, a detailed simulation based performance study and analysis is performed on the reactive routing protocols to verify the suitability of these protocols over such kind of networks. Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) routing protocol are considered as the representative of reactive routing protocols. The performance differentials are investigated using varying traffic load and number of source. Based on the simulation results, how the performance of each protocol can be improved is also recommended.Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), IEEE 802.11s, AODV, DSR, DYMO

Scalable energy-efficient routing in mobile Ad hoc network

The quick deployment without any existing infrastructure makes mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) a striking choice for dynamic situations such as military and rescue operations, disaster recovery, and so on and so forth. However, routing remains one of the major issues in MANET due to the highly dynamic and distributed environment. Energy consumption is also a significant issue in ad hoc networks since the nodes are battery powered. This report discusses some major dominating set based approaches to perform energy efficient routing in mobile ad hoc networks. It also presents the performance results for each of these mentioned approaches in terms of throughput, average end to end delay and the life time in terms of the first node failure. Based on the simulation results, I identified the key issues in these protocols regarding network life time. In this report, I propose and discuss a new approach “Dynamic Dominating Set Generation Algorithm” (DDSG) to optimize the network life time. This algorithm dynamically selects dominating nodes during the process of routing and thus creates a smaller dominating set. DDSG algorithm thereby eliminates the energy consumption from the non-used dominating nodes. In order to further increase the network life time, the algorithm takes into consideration the threshold settings which helps to distribute the process of routing within the network. This helps to eliminate a single dominating node from getting drained out by continuous transmission and reception of packets. In this report, the detailed algorithmic design and performance results through simulation is discussed

Neighbour coverage: a dynamic probabilistic route discovery for mobile ad hoc networks

Blind flooding is extensively use in ad hoc routing protocols for on-demand route discovery, where a mobile node blindly rebroadcasts received route request (RREQ) packets until a route to a particular destination is established. This can potentially lead to high channel contention, causing redundant retransmissions and thus excessive packet collisions in the network. Such a phenomenon induces what is known as broadcast storm problem, which has been shown to greatly increase the network communication overhead and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we show that the deleterious impact of such a problem can be reduced if measures are taken during the dissemination of RREQ packets. We propose a generic probabilistic method for route discovery, that is simple to implement and can significantly reduce the overhead associated with the dissemination of RREQs. Our analysis reveals that equipping AODV with probabilistic route discovery can result in significant reduction of routing control overhead while achieving good throughput

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Adaptive Cross-Layer Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

[EN] Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are generally created for temporary scenarios. In such scenarios, where nodes are in mobility, efficient routing is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and cross-layer multipath routing protocol for such changing scenarios. Our routing mechanisms operate keeping in view the type of applications. For simple applications, the proposed protocol is inspired from traditional on-demand routing protocols by searching shortest routes from source to destination using default parameters. In case of multimedia applications, the proposed mechanism considers such routes which are capable of providing more data rates having less packet loss ratio. For those applications which need security, the proposed mechanism searches such routes which are more secure in nature as compared to others. Cross-layer methodology is used in proposed routing scheme so as to exchange different parameters across the protocol stack for better decision-making at network layer. Our approach is efficient and fault tolerant in a variety of scenarios that we simulated and tested.The authors would like to extend their sincere appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this research group no. 037-1435-RG.Iqbal, Z.; Khan, S.; Mehmood, A.; Lloret, J.; Alrajeh, NA. (2016). Adaptive Cross-Layer Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Sensors. 2016:1-18. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/5486437S1182016Abusalah, L., Khokhar, A., & Guizani, M. (2008). A survey of secure mobile Ad Hoc routing protocols. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 10(4), 78-93. doi:10.1109/surv.2008.080407Murthy, S., & Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. J. (1996). An efficient routing protocol for wireless networks. Mobile Networks and Applications, 1(2), 183-197. doi:10.1007/bf01193336Toh, C.-K. (1997). Wireless Personal Communications, 4(2), 103-139. doi:10.1023/a:1008812928561Pearlman, M. R., & Haas, Z. J. (1999). Determining the optimal configuration for the zone routing protocol. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(8), 1395-1414. doi:10.1109/49.779922ZHEN, Y., WU, M., WU, D., ZHANG, Q., & XU, C. (2010). Toward path reliability by using adaptive multi-path routing mechanism for multimedia service in mobile Ad-hoc network. The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications, 17(1), 93-100. doi:10.1016/s1005-8885(09)60431-3Sivakumar, R., Sinha, P., & Bharghavan, V. (1999). CEDAR: a core-extraction distributed ad hoc routing algorithm. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(8), 1454-1465. doi:10.1109/49.779926Zapata, M. G. (2002). Secure ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing. ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 6(3), 106-107. doi:10.1145/581291.581312Khan, S., & Loo, J. (2010). Cross Layer Secure and Resource-Aware On-Demand Routing Protocol for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks. Wireless Personal Communications, 62(1), 201-214. doi:10.1007/s11277-010-0048-ySharma, V., & Alam, B. (2012). Unicaste Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey. International Journal of Computer Applications, 51(14), 9-18. doi:10.5120/8108-1714Tarique, M., Tepe, K. E., Adibi, S., & Erfani, S. (2009). Survey of multipath routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 32(6), 1125-1143. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2009.07.002Shiwen Mao, Shunan Lin, Yao Wang, Panwar, S. S., & Yihan Li. (2005). Multipath video transport over ad hoc networks. IEEE Wireless Communications, 12(4), 42-49. doi:10.1109/mwc.2005.1497857Li, Z., Chen, Q., Zhu, G., Choi, Y., & Sekiya, H. (2015). A Low Latency, Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 11(8), 946587. doi:10.1155/2015/946587Zheng, Z., Liu, A., Cai, L. X., Chen, Z., & Shen, X. (2016). Energy and memory efficient clone detection in wireless sensor networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 15(5), 1130-1143. doi:10.1109/tmc.2015.2449847Dong, M., Ota, K., Liu, A., & Guo, M. (2016). Joint Optimization of Lifetime and Transport Delay under Reliability Constraint Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 27(1), 225-236. doi:10.1109/tpds.2015.2388482Hamrioui, S., Lorenz, P., Lloret, J., & Lalam, M. (2013). A Cross Layer Solution for Better Interactions Between Routing and Transport Protocols in MANET. Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 21(3), 137. doi:10.2498/cit.1002136Sanchez-Iborra, R., & Cano, M.-D. (2014). An approach to a cross layer-based QoE improvement for MANET routing protocols. Network Protocols and Algorithms, 6(3), 18. doi:10.5296/npa.v6i3.5827Cho, J.-H., Swami, A., & Chen, I.-R. (2011). A Survey on Trust Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 13(4), 562-583. doi:10.1109/surv.2011.092110.0008

Performance Comparison of the RPL and LOADng Routing Protocols in a Home Automation Scenario

RPL, the routing protocol proposed by IETF for IPv6/6LoWPAN Low Power and Lossy Networks has significant complexity. Another protocol called LOADng, a lightweight variant of AODV, emerges as an alternative solution. In this paper, we compare the performance of the two protocols in a Home Automation scenario with heterogenous traffic patterns including a mix of multipoint-to-point and point-to-multipoint routes in realistic dense non-uniform network topologies. We use Contiki OS and Cooja simulator to evaluate the behavior of the ContikiRPL implementation and a basic non-optimized implementation of LOADng. Unlike previous studies, our results show that RPL provides shorter delays, less control overhead, and requires less memory than LOADng. Nevertheless, enhancing LOADng with more efficient flooding and a better route storage algorithm may improve its performance

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