Ad Hoc Networks

Multi-channel wireless networks are increasingly deployed as infrastructure networks, e.g. in metro areas. Network nodes frequently employ directional antennas to improve spatial throughput. In such networks, between two nodes, it is of interest to compute a path with a channel assignment for the links such that the path and link bandwidths are the same. This is achieved when any two consecutive links are assigned different channels, termed as "Channel-Discontinuity-Constraint" (CDC). CDC-paths are also useful in TDMA systems, where, preferably, consecutive links are assigned different time-slots. In the first part of this paper, we develop a t-spanner for CDC-paths using spatial properties; a sub-network containing O(n/θ) links, for any θ > 0, such that CDC-paths increase in cost by at most a factor t = (1-2 sin (θ/2))-2. We propose a novel distributed algorithm to compute the spanner using an expected number of O(n log n) fixed-size messages. In the second part, we present a distributed algorithm to find minimum-cost CDC-paths between two nodes using O(n2) fixed-size messages, by developing an extension of Edmonds' algorithm for minimum-cost perfect matching. In a centralized implementation, our algorithm runs in O(n2) time improving the previous best algorithm which requires O(n3) running time. Moreover, this running time improves to O(n/θ) when used in conjunction with the spanner developed.

This paper studies the TCP performance with delayed ack in wireless networks (including ad hoc and WLANs) which use IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol as the underlying medium access control. Our analysis and simulations show that TCP throughput does not always benefit from an unrestricted delay policy. In fact, for a given topology and flow pattern, there exists an optimal delay window size at the receiver that produces best TCP throughput. If the window is set too small, the receiver generates too many acks and causes channel contention; on the other hand, if set the window too high, the bursty transmission at the sender triggered by large cumulative acks will induce interference and packet losses, thus degrading the throughout. In wireless networks, packet losses are also related to the length of TCP path; when traveling through a longer path, a packet is more likely to suffer interference. Therefore, path length is an important factor to consider when choosing appropriate delay window sizes. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive delayed ack mechanism which is suitable for ad hoc networks, then we propose a more general adaptive delayed ack scheme for ad hoc and hybrid networks. The simulated results show that our schemes can effectively improve TCP throughput by up to 30% in static networks, and provide more significant gain in mobile networks. The proposed schemes are simple and easy to deploy.

Future sensor networks would comprise of sensing devices with energy harvesting capabilities from renewable energy sources such as solar power. A key research question in such sensor systems is to maximize the asymptotic event detection probability achieved in the system, in the presence of energy constraints and uncertainties. This paper focuses on the design of adaptive algorithms for sensor activation in the presence of uncertainty in the event phenomena. We borrow ideas from increase/decrease algorithms used in TCP congestion avoidance, and design an online and adaptive activation algorithm, that varies the subsequent sleep interval according to additive increase and multiplicative decrease based upon the sensor's current energy level. In addition, the proposed algorithm does not depend on global system parameters, or on the degree of event correlations, and hence can easily be deployed in practical scenarios. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only achieves near-optimal performance, but also exhibits more stability with respect to sensor's energy level and sleep interval variations.

This paper studies the problem of interference-free broadcast in wireless ad hoc networks. In particular, we are interested in asymmetric power assignments so that the induced broadcast communication graph is both, energy efficient and has a short collision-free broadcast schedule. We consider both random and deterministic node layouts and develop four different broadcast schemes with provable performance guarantees on three optimization objectives simultaneously: total energy consumption, network lifetime and collision-free schedule length. We also show some numerical results which support our findings.

We present a systematic analysis of insider attacks against mobile ad-hoc routing protocols, using the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol as an example. It identifies a number of attack goals and then studies how to achieve these goals through misuses of the routing messages. To facilitate the analysis, we classify the insider attacks into two categories: atomic misuses and compound misuses. Atomic misuses are performed by manipulating a single routing message, which cannot be further divided; compound misuses are composed of combinations of atomic misuses and possibly normal uses of the routing protocol. The analysis results reveal several classes of insider attacks, including route disruption, route invasion, node isolation, and resource consumption. We also describe simulation results that demonstrate the impact of these attacks.

Wireless sensor networks have been used for many delay-sensitive applications, e.g., emergency response and plant automation. In such networks, delay measurement is important for a number of reasons, e.g., real-time control of the networked system, and abnormal delay detection. In this paper, we propose a measurement architecture using distributed air sniffers, which provides convenient delay measurement, and requires no clock synchronization or instrumentation at the sensor nodes. One challenge in deploying this architecture is how to place the sniffers for efficient delay measurement. We prove the sniffer placement problem is NP-hard and develop two algorithms to solve it. Using a combination of small-scale testbed experiments and large-scale simulation, we demonstrate that our architecture leads to accurate delay monitoring and is effective in detecting abnormal delays, and furthermore, the number of sniffers required by our sniffer placement algorithms is close to the minimum required value.

A new routing protocol that handles real-time and non-real time applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed. We employ the idea of dividing the sensor network field into grids. Inside each grid, one of the sensor nodes is selected as a master node which is responsible for delivering the data generated by any node in that grid and for routing the data received from other master nodes in the neighbor grids. For each master node, multiple paths that connect the master node to the sink are stored as routing entries in the routing table of that node. These paths are the diagonal paths between the sink and the master node. In case of congestion occurrence, a novel congestion control mechanism is also proposed in order to relieve the congested areas. Simulation results have shown that our proposed protocol has the capability to extend the lifetime of the sensor network and to utilize the available storage.

There is a growing need for enabling reprogramming in a working sensor network. We prefer to meet the requirements remotely instead of collecting all deployed sensors. Identifying the version difference of data items, having the same key, could significantly reduce the communication overhead, because only those out-of-date items should be updated at each sensor. Previous protocols need to exchange multiple messages to identify a version difference between two items with the same key. In this paper, we propose a reliable and energy efficient data dissemination protocol (BDP) with less propagation delay. BDP uses Bloom filters to identify a version difference between two items with the same key, and find the new one between two items having the same key but different versions. Through comprehensive simulations, we show that BDP outperforms previous work in terms of energy cost and propagation delay of updating new items with high reliability.

Point-to-point transmissions represent a fundamental primitive in any communication network. Despite many proposals have appeared in the literature, providing an efficient implementation of such an abstraction in mobile ad hoc networks still remains an open issue. This paper proposes a probabilistic protocol for unicast packet delivery in a MANET. Unlike the classical routing protocols, in our proposal packet forwarding is not driven by a previously computed path. Rather, the nodes of the network exploit a set of routing meta-information (called hints) to discover a path to the destination on-the-fly. This assures robustness to topological changes, while requiring a very low overhead. A node gathers hints from the nodes located within a small number of hops (called the protocol's lookahead) from itself. As showed through simulations, very good performance can be obtained with small lookahead. The main statistical properties of hints have been investigated through an analytical model, which is also reported in the paper.

Wireless distributed sensor networks (DSNs) are important for a number of strategic applications such as coordinated target detection, surveillance, and localization. Energy is a critical resource in wireless sensor networks and system lifetime needs to be prolonged through the use of energy-conscious sensing strategies during system operation. We propose an energy-aware target detection and localization strategy for cluster-based wireless sensor networks. The proposed method is based on an a posteriori algorithm with a two-step communication protocol between the cluster head and the sensors within the cluster. Based on a limited amount of data received from the sensor nodes, the cluster head executes a localization procedure to determine the subset of sensors that must be queried for detailed target information. This approach reduces both energy consumption and communication bandwidth requirements, and prolongs the lifetime of the wireless sensor network. Simulation results show that a large amount of energy is saved during target localization using this strategy.

In this paper, we propose an efficient routing solution for correlated data collection in wireless sensor networks. Our proposed routing metric considers both the interference distribution as well as the data correlation when establishing routes. An iterative, distributed solution based on local information is proposed using a game theoretic framework. Routes are chosen to minimize both the interference impact of nodes in their neighborhood and the joint entropy of multiple sources relayed through common nodes.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are usually operated among vehicles moving at high speeds, and thus their communication relations can be changed frequently. In such a highly dynamic environment, establishing trust among vehicles is difficult. To solve this problem, we propose a flexible, secure and decentralized attribute based secure key management framework for VANETs. Our solution is based on attribute based encryption (ABE) to construct an attribute based security policy enforcement (ASPE) framework. ASPE considers various road situations as attributes. These attributes are used as encryption keys to secure the transmitted data. ASPE is flexible in that it can dynamically change encryption keys depending on the VANET situations. At the same time, ASPE naturally incorporates data access control policies on the transmitted data. ASPE provides an integrated solution to involve data access control, key management, security policy enforcement, and secure group formation in highly dynamic vehicular communication environments. Our performance evaluations show that ASPE is efficient and it can handle large amount of data encryption/decryption flows in VANETs.

This paper proposes a new energy efficient algorithm to find and maintain routes in mobile ad hoc networks. The proposal borrows the notion of learning from a previous research on cognitive packet networks (CPN) to create a robust routing protocol. Our idea uses smart packets that exploit the use of unicasts and broadcasts to search for routes. Because unicasts impose lower overall overhead, their use is preferred. Smart packets learn how to make good unicast routing decisions by employing a combined goal function which considers both the energy stored in the nodes and path delay. The end result is a dynamic discovery of paths that offer an equilibrium between low-delay routes and an efficient use of network resources that extends the working lifetime of the network.

Flows transported across mobile ad hoc wireless networks suffer from route breakups caused by nodal mobility. In a network that aims to support critical interactive real-time data transactions, to provide for the uninterrupted execution of a transaction, or for the rapid transport of a high value file, it is essential to identify robust routes across which such transactions are transported. Noting that route failures can induce long re-routing delays that may be highly interruptive for many applications and message/stream transactions, it is beneficial to configure the routing scheme to send a flow across a route whose lifetime is longer, with sufficiently high probability, than the estimated duration of the activity that it is selected to carry. We evaluate the ability of a mobile ad hoc wireless network to distribute flows across robust routes by introducing the robust throughput measure as a performance metric. The utility gained by the delivery of flow messages is based on the level of interruption experienced by the underlying transaction. As a special case, for certain applications only transactions that are completed without being prematurely interrupted may convey data to their intended users that is of acceptable utility. We describe the mathematical calculation of a network’s robust throughput measure, as well as its robust throughput capacity. We introduce the robust flow admission and routing algorithm (RFAR) to provide for the timely and robust transport of flow transactions across mobile ad hoc wireless network systems.

In this paper, a path discovery scheme which supports QoS routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in the presence of imprecise information is investigated. The aim is to increase the probability of success in finding feasible paths and reduce average path cost of a previously proposed ticket based probing (TBP) path discovery scheme. The proposed scheme integrates the original TBP scheme with a reinforcement learning method called the on-policy first-visit Monte Carlo (ONMC) method. We investigate the performance of the ONMC method in the presence of imprecise information. Our numerical study shows that, in respect to a flooding based algorithm, message overhead reduction can be achieved with marginal difference in the path search ability and additional computational and storage requirements. When the average message overhead of the ONMC method is reduced to the same order of magnitude of the original TBP, the ONMC method gains an improvement of 28% in success ratio and 7% reduction in the average path cost over the original TBP.

Due to the limited lifetime of the nodes in ad hoc network, energy efficiency needs to be an important design consideration in any routing algorithm for ad hoc and sensor networks. In most of the existing position-based routing algorithms the nodes use the maximum transmission power to discover neighbors, which may cause excessive power consumption. This paper presents several localized power-aware 3D position-based routing algorithms that increase the lifetime of a network by maximizing the average lifetime of its nodes. New algorithms are semi-beaconless, using for neighbor discovery an optimal transmission range (OR) for control packets, and, if needed, maximal transmission range (MR) during routing process, and using adjusted transmission radius for message transmission. PAGR algorithm selects neighbor closest to destination among those within OR if any exists providing progress, or otherwise among those within MR. If greedy progress is not possible, PAGR:CFace(1) variant resorts to face routing on projected network in coordinate plane until recovery is possible, at which point PAGR algorithm resumes. We evaluate our algorithms and compare their power savings with the current power-aware routing algorithms. The simulation results show a significant improvement in the overall network lifetime.

An efficient channel assignment strategy ensures capacity maximization in a multiradio, multichannel ad hoc network. Existing mechanisms either use a static channel assignment or a centralized process intensive system that assigns channels to individual nodes. These are not effective in a dynamic environment with multiple flows that are active at different time instants. The protocol proposed in this work (Lattice routing) manages channels of the radios for the different nodes in the network using information about current channel conditions and adapts itself to varying traffic patterns in order to efficiently use the multiple channels. Further the protocol uses multipathing, a key mechanism that is found to alleviate bottlenecks present in single path routes in such an environment. Results indicate that Lattice routing consistently outperforms it closest competitor ((MCR) Kyasanur and Vaidya (2006) [1]) across a large number of experiments.

Localization is crucial to many applications in wireless sensor networks. In this article, we propose a range-free anchor-based localization algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks that builds upon the Monte Carlo localization algorithm. We concentrate on improving the localization accuracy and efficiency by making better use of the information a sensor node gathers and by drawing the necessary location samples faster. To do so, we constrain the area from which samples are drawn by building a box that covers the region where anchors’ radio ranges overlap. This box is the region of the deployment area where the sensor node is localized. Simulation results show that localization accuracy is improved by a minimum of 4% and by a maximum of 73% (average 30%), for varying node speeds when considering nodes with knowledge of at least three anchors. The coverage is also strongly affected by speed and its improvement ranges from 3% to 55% (average 22%). Finally, the processing time is reduced by 93% for a similar localization accuracy.

IEEE 802.11 MAC mainly relies on two techniques to combat interference: physical carrier sensing and RTS/CTS handshake (also known as “virtual carrier sensing”). Ideally, the RTS/CTS handshake can eliminate most interference. However, the effectiveness of RTS/CTS handshake is based on the assumption that hidden nodes are within transmission range of receivers. In this paper, we prove using analytic models that in ad hoc networks, such an assumption cannot hold due to the fact that power needed for interrupting a packet reception is much lower than that of delivering a packet successfully. Thus, the “virtual carrier sensing” implemented by RTS/CTS handshake cannot prevent all interference as we expect in theory. Physical carrier sensing can complement this in some degree. However, since interference happens at receivers, while physical carrier sensing is detecting transmitters (the same problem causing the hidden terminal situation), physical carrier sensing cannot help much, unless a very large carrier sensing range is adopted, which is limited by the antenna sensitivity. In this paper, we investigate how effective is the RTS/CTS handshake in terms of reducing interference. We show that in some situations, the interference range is much larger than transmission range, where RTS/CTS cannot function well. Two independent solutions are proposed in this paper. One is a simple enhancement to the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The other is to utilize directional antennas. Simulation results verify that the proposed schemes indeed can help IEEE 802.11 resolve most interference caused by large interference range.

The paper evaluates the performance effects of exposed terminals in IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks in finite load conditions. It derives analytical models for the estimation of channel utilization and media access delay for IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks in finite load conditions with and without exposed terminals. The simulation results show that the analytical estimated channel utilization and media access delay metrics are fairly accurate.

Supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in wireless networks is a challenging problem. The IEEE 802.11 LAN standard was developed primarily for elastic data applications. In order to support the transmission of real-time data, a polling-based scheme called the point coordination function (PCF) was introduced in IEEE 802.11. However, PCF was not able to meet the desired and practical service differentiation requirements to fulfill the need of real-time data. Therefore, Task Group E of the IEEE 802.11 working group released several IEEE 802.11e drafts, whose main task is to support QoS in IEEE 802.11 LANs. The polling scheme of PCF is extended in IEEE 802.11e into the more complex hybrid coordination function (HCF). We found that HCF has several performance issues that may affect its anticipated performance. In this paper, we address these issues and propose a QoS enhancement over PCF, called enhanced PCF (EPCF) that enables Wireless LAN to send a combination of voice, data and isochronous data packets using the current IEEE 802.11 PCF. First, we compare the performance of the proposed model (EPCF) with the HCF function of the IEEE 802.11e through simulation. Second, we extend the proposed model (EPCF) to work in a multihop wireless ad hoc mode and present the advantages and limitations in this case. Simulation results demonstrate an enhanced performance of our scheme over the legacy PCF and a comparable performance to the IEEE 802.11e HCF in terms of the average delay and system throughput. However, EPCF is much simpler than HCF, provides flow differentiation, and is easy to implement in the current IEEE 802.11 standard.

IEEE 802.11 power save mode (PSM) is a representative of energy-saving protocols which put wireless network interfaces into sleep during idleness. To save energy, part of the performance of IEEE 802.11 is sacrificed attributed to the wake-up latency thus introduced. This paper proposes a complementary mechanism, called link-indexed statistical traffic predictor (LISP) to improve IEEE 802.11 PSM. LISP employs a simple, light-weight traffic prediction method to speed up the delivery of packets along the end-to-end path. By seeking the inherent correlation between ATIM_ACKs and incoming traffic, nodes en route stay awake in the beacon intervals in which packets are anticipated to arrive. As the result, a “freeway” is bridged for packets to rapidly traverse the route. Meanwhile, the number of duty cycles is reduced and more energy is conserved. We have conducted analytical and simulation studies and demonstrated the effectiveness of LISP. The impact of various factors is investigated, including traffic load, number of hops (of routes which connections traverse), ATIM window size and packet size, in both tandem networks and networks of arbitrary topologies.

The distributed coordination function (DCF) mode of the IEEE 802.11 MAC standard, though proposed for medium access in wireless local area networks, is seen as the de-facto medium access standard in multi-hop wireless networks. In this paper we contend that the unique characteristics that differentiate multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks from local area wireless networks render the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol inefficient in ad-hoc networks. Specifically, we focus on the band of contention and the fairness model employed by the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in our study. We substantiate our arguments through simulations of idealized (centralized) protocols, and consider the key changes required to adapt the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol for multi-hop wireless networks. We then propose a simple medium access scheme within the IEEE 802.11 MAC framework, called flow based medium access (FBMA) that achieves significantly better fairness properties while adhering to the purely distributed operations of the basic IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed MAC protocol through simulations.

We develop a scalable \textit{cell-level} analytical model for multi-cell infrastructure IEEE 802.11 WLANs under a so-called Pairwise Binary Dependence (PBD) condition. The PBD condition is a geometric property under which the relative locations of the nodes inside a cell do not matter and the network is free of \textit{hidden nodes}. For the cases of saturated nodes and TCP-controlled long-file downloads, we provide accurate predictions of cell throughputs. Similar to Bonald et al (Sigmetrics, 2008), we model a multi-cell WLAN under short-file downloads as "a network of processor-sharing queues with state-dependent service rates." Whereas the state-dependent service rates proposed by Bonald et al are based only on the \textit{number} of contending neighbors, we employ state-dependent service rates that incorporate the the impact of the overall \textit{topology} of the network. We propose an \textit{effective service rate approximation} technique and obtain good approximations for the \textit{mean flow transfer delay} in each cell. For TCP-controlled downloads where the APs transmit a large fraction of time, we show that the throughputs predicted under the PBD condition are very good approximations in two important scenarios where hidden nodes are indeed present and the PBD condition does not strictly hold.

Energy efficiency is one of the most important concerns in wireless networks because wireless clients usually have limited battery power. The aim of this work is to reduce energy consumption by exploiting multi-rate diversity in 802.11 wireless networks. An important observation is that “probabilistic rate combination” in transmission can significantly reduce power consumption. We formulate the energy efficient rate combination as a non-convex optimization problem. A non-cooperative rate adaptation scheme is presented to reduce power consumption without information exchange. Each node selects rate combination strategy and computes its transmission probability based on the weighted average interface queue length. Due to the well-known “rate anomaly” problem, selfish nodes may choose to transmit at a lower rate free ride from the other nodes. To mitigate this problem, we propose a joint consecutive packet transmission (CPT) and contention window adaptation mechanism (CWA). We prove the stability of our proposed algorithm, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first control theoretical analysis on 802.11 “multi-rate” wireless networks. Simulation results show that the probabilistic rate combination can greatly save battery power, even up to 700% times compared with standard 802.11a/h protocol.