Collision Resolution Algorithm Research Articles

Terraforming – Environment Manipulation during Disruptions for Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery

In automated warehouses, teams of mobile robots fulfill the packaging process by transferring inventory pods to designated workstations while navigating narrow aisles formed by tightly packed pods. This problem is typically modeled as a Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD) problem, which is then solved by repeatedly planning collision-free paths for agents on a fixed graph, as in the Rolling-Horizon Collision Resolution (RHCR) algorithm. However, existing approaches make the limiting assumption that agents are only allowed to move pods that correspond to their current task, while considering the other pods as stationary obstacles (even though all pods are movable). This behavior can result in unnecessarily long paths which could otherwise be avoided by opening additional corridors via pod manipulation. To this end, we explore the implications of allowing agents the flexibility of dynamically relocating pods. We call this new challenging problem Terraforming MAPD (tMAPD) and develop an RHCR-based approach to tackle it. As the extra flexibility of terraforming comes at a significant computational cost, we utilize this capability judiciously by identifying situations where it could make a significant impact on the solution quality. In particular, we invoke terraforming in response to disruptions that often occur in automated warehouses, e.g., when an item is dropped from a pod or when agents malfunction. Empirically, using our approach for tMAPD, where disruptions are modeled via a stochastic process, we improve throughput by over 10%, reduce the maximum service time (the difference between the drop-off time and the pickup time of a pod) by more than 50%, without drastically increasing the runtime, compared to the MAPD setting.

Low-complexity scheduling algorithms with constant queue length and throughput guarantees

Distributed scheduling algorithms based on carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) are optimal in terms of the throughput and the steady-state queue lengths. However, they take a prohibitively long time to reach the steady-state, often exponential in the network size. Therefore for large networks that operate over a finite time horizon, apart from the guarantees on the steady-state queue lengths, performance guarantees on the short-term (i.e., transient) queuing behaviour are also required. To that end, we propose distributed scheduling algorithms that are guaranteed to have O(1) expected queue lengths not just in the steady-state but at every time instant, where O(⋅) is with respect to the network size. Further, our algorithms have O(1) complexity and support a constant fraction of the maximum throughput for typical wireless topologies. The central idea of our algorithms is to resolve collisions among pairs of conflicting nodes by assigning a master–follower hierarchy. The master–follower hierarchy can either be chosen randomly or based on the topology of the conflict graph, leading to different performance guarantees.In addition to these hierarchical collision resolution algorithms, which are primarily designed for the conflict graph-based interference model, we also propose an Aloha-based algorithm for the K-neighbour collision tolerance interference model, which is a generalization of the conflict graph model. We show that the proposed Aloha-based algorithm supports a constant fraction of the maximum throughput for typical wireless topologies.

Leveraging Experience in Lifelong Multi-Agent Pathfinding

In Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (L-MAPF) a team of agents performs a stream of tasks consisting of multiple locations to be visited by the agents on a shared graph while avoiding collisions with one another. L-MAPF is typically tackled by partitioning it into multiple consecutive, and hence similar, "one-shot" MAPF queries, as in the Rolling-Horizon Collision Resolution (RHCR) algorithm. Therefore, a solution to one query informs the next query, which leads to similarity with respect to the agents' start and goal positions, and how collisions need to be resolved from one query to the next. Thus, experience from solving one MAPF query can potentially be used to speedup solving the next one. Despite this intuition, current L-MAPF planners solve consecutive MAPF queries from scratch. In this paper, we introduce a new RHCR-inspired approach called exRHCR, which exploits experience in its constituent MAPF queries. In particular, exRHCR employs an extension of Priority-Based Search (PBS), a state-of-the-art MAPF solver. The extension, which we call exPBS, allows to warm-start the search with the priorities between agents used by PBS in the previous MAPF instances. We demonstrate empirically that exRHCR solves L-MAPF instances up to 39% faster than RHCR, and has the potential to increase system throughput for given task streams by increasing the number of agents a planner can cope with for a given time budget.

Collision Resolution for Random Access

As a building block toward a simple and scalable solution for massive random access, we introduce collision-resolution algorithms using successive interference cancellation (SIC) based on the received signals, with no need for any coordination or codebook differentiation. We first consider two-user multiple access with the ZigZag algorithm. We prove that the original ZigZag and a modified version of it, called double-zipper ZigZag, attain the same performance as the optimal coordinated time-sharing in the high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime, even in the presence of channel state information (CSI) errors. We then extend the results to the case of arbitrary number of users employing delay-domain processing. Specifically, we introduce delay-domain zero forcing and its regularized version, which are able to cancel and suppress the interference among users, respectively. By obtaining a post-processing system model and characterizing the accumulated noise during the decoupling process, we also derive bounds on the achievable sum-rates of the proposed algorithm for both cases of perfect and imperfect CSI. Simulation results show that the newly proposed approach have comparable performance with coordinated time-sharing at high SNRs.

Application of DCT to problem of collision resolution in RFID SAW systems by using correlation method

The article is devoted to SAW RFID systems. A problem of collision resolution by using a correlation method is under consideration. Collision is resolves by means of two correlation features, by the correlation function of the signal and by the correlation function of the DCT from the signal. A program, which is implements such collision resolution algorithm, was written. A collision is creating by using a simulation model of RFID tag. The model can generate a response from tag with «own» or with a random code, or can generate a collision of responses with random codes, which may contain or not contain an «own» code. The results of the algorithm’s operation are presented for the cases of reading from two to ten tags simultaneously. In addition to the main function, the algorithm implements error-correcting coding and decoding functions. It allows eliminating errors in case when there is no collision of tags, but a level of channel noise is high. The error-correcting coding is implemented by Reed-Solomon codes.

A scalable computational platform for particulate Stokes suspensions

We describe a computational framework for simulating suspensions of rigid particles in Newtonian Stokes flow. One central building block is a collision-resolution algorithm that overcomes the numerical constraints arising from particle collisions. This algorithm extends the well-known complementarity method for non-smooth multi-body dynamics to resolve collisions in dense rigid body suspensions. This approach formulates the collision resolution problem as a linear complementarity problem with geometric ‘non-overlapping’ constraints imposed at each time-step. It is then reformulated as a constrained quadratic programming problem and the Barzilai-Borwein projected gradient descent method is applied for its solution. This framework is designed to be applicable for any convex particle shape, e.g., spheres and spherocylinders, and applicable to any Stokes mobility solver, including the Rotne-Prager-Yamakawa approximation, Stokesian Dynamics, and PDE solvers (e.g., boundary integral and immersed boundary methods). In particular, this method imposes Newton's Third Law and records the entire contact network. Further, we describe a fast, parallel, and spectrally-accurate boundary integral method tailored for spherical particles, capable of resolving lubrication effects. We show weak and strong parallel scalings up to 8×104 particles with approximately 4×107 degrees of freedom on 1792 cores. We demonstrate the versatility of this framework with several examples, including sedimentation of particle clusters, and active matter systems composed of ensembles of particles driven to rotate.

Asynchronous Blind Network-Assisted Diversity Multiple Access

We present a blind collision resolution algorithm in slow fading channels based on retransmission diversity. The algorithm neither assumes packet nor symbol synchronization of the different users and it does not demand estimates of the arrival times of the collided signals. The proposed scheme works independently of the relative alignment of the packets, so it can also resolve synchronous collisions. The decoding complexity does not scale with the packet size and thus does not burden the receiver. In the blocking mode, the algorithm achieves high throughput and low queuing delay similar to synchronous network division multiple access (NDMA) protocols. In the non-blocking mode, there is longer queuing delay of the packets before transmission, but the throughput is still high due to faster accumulation of the buffered packets at the transmitters.

Resolving Colliding Larvae by Fitting ASM to Random Walker-Based Pre-Segmentations.

Drosophila melanogaster is an important model organism for research in neuro- and behavioral biology. Automated studies of their locomotion are crucial to link sensory input and neural processing to motor output which has led to numerous vision-based tracking systems. However, most of these approaches share the inability to segment the contours of colliding animals causing identity losses, appearing and disappearing animals, and the absence of posture and motion related measurements during the time of the collision. We present a novel collision resolution algorithm enabling an accurate contour segmentation of multiple touching Drosophila larvae. Our algorithm utilizes an adapted active shape model (ASM) to learn a low dimensional posture space which is fitted to random-walker generated pre-segmentations. We evaluate our collision resolution algorithm using three publicly available datasets and compare it with the current state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we introduce a refined dataset enabling a segmentation evaluation on the level of pixel accuracy. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and computational time. We will incorporate this algorithm into our widely used tracking program to improve the statistical strength of the behavioral quantification and allow marker-free studies of interacting Drosophila larvae.

An Effective Algorithm for Collision Resolution in Security Policy Rules

A firewall is the main classic tool for monitoring and managing the network traffic on a local network. Its task is to compare the network traffic passing through it with the established security rules. These rules, which are often also called security policy, can be defined both before and during the operation of the firewall. Managing the security policy of large corporate networks is a complex task. In order to properly implement it, firewall filtering rules must be written and organized neatly and without errors. In addition, the process of changing or inserting new rules should be performed only after a careful analysis of the relationship between the rules being modified or inserted, as well as the rules that already exist in the security policy. In this article, the authors consider the classification of relations between security policy rules and also give the definition of all sorts of conflicts between them. In addition, the authors present a new efficient algorithm for detecting and resolving collisions in firewall rules by the example of the Floodlight SDN controller.

Computing collision stress in assemblies of active spherocylinders: Applications of a fast and generic geometric method.

In this work, we provide a solution to the problem of computing collision stress in particle-tracking simulations. First, a formulation for the collision stress between particles is derived as an extension of the virial stress formula to general-shaped particles with uniform or non-uniform mass density. Second, we describe a collision-resolution algorithm based on geometric constraint minimization which eliminates the stiff pairwise potentials in traditional methods. The method is validated with a comparison to the equation of state of Brownian spherocylinders. Then we demonstrate the application of this method in several emerging problems of soft active matter.

A Collision Resolution Algorithm for RFID Using Modified Dynamic Tree With Bayesian Tag Estimation

A new tree-based anti-collision protocol for radio-frequency identification systems is proposed to achieve a very high tag identification efficiency. The proposed algorithm works in two phases. In the first phase, the number of competing tags is estimated through the proposed Bayesian estimation technique, while in the second phase, tags are identified using our modified dynamic tree algorithm. The system efficiency is mathematically derived and verified through simulation. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a tag identification system efficiency of 45% and a time system efficiency of 78.5%, thus outperforming any existing collision resolution algorithms.

On Number of Tags Estimation in RFID Systems

According to the latest version of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) standard, EPCglobal UHF Gen2, dynamic framed slotted ALOHA has been accepted and employed as the de facto collision resolution algorithm to share the channel usage when multiple tags respond to the reader's signal command simultaneously. However, the frame size in read cycle is usually far from optimal when the reader does not know the number of unidentified tags in its interrogation zone, and this will lead to several performance issues and technical limitations such as power consumption, longer reading time, and degraded system performance. In this paper, we show that the number of unidentified tags can be expressed as a function of the collision rate received by the reader when the reader collects tags' information, and then we use an extended Kalman filter-based tag number estimation algorithm to estimate the number of unidentified tags in an RFID system on run-time measurements. Simulation results show that our scheme provides much better accuracy than existing well-known approaches even in a fast-changing environment.

A Multichannel Medium Access Control Protocol for Vehicular Power Line Communication Systems

In-vehicle communications are emerging to play an important role in the continued development of reliable and efficient X-by-Wire applications in new vehicles. Since vehicle devices, sensors, and the electronic control unit (ECU) are already connected to power wires, the advancement of power line communications (PLCs) can provide a very low cost and virtually free platform for in-vehicle communications. In this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol for vehicular PLC systems, where multiple nodes are competing for transmission over the direct current (dc) power line. The proposed protocol uses a combination of time and frequency multiplexing and consists of two key features: 1) a distributed channel selection policy to arbitrate packet transmission across different channels and provide robustness against interference and noise and 2) a distributed collision resolution algorithm to allow efficient nodes completion over selected channels. Specifically, the collision resolution algorithm is optimized with respect to the channel policy such that the success probability of transmission in each channel is maximized. Numerical results are also supplemented to validate the performance of the proposed protocol and provide useful guidelines for developing a robust contention-based MAC protocol for vehicular PLC systems.

Formal Analysis of an Energy-aware Collision Resolution Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper provides a comprehensive and rigorous study of a novel collision resolution algorithm for wireless sensor networks: 2CS-WSN. It is specifically designed to be used during the contention phase of IEEE 802.15.4. This algorithm has been modelled in terms of discrete time Markov chains (DTMCs) and, using the probabilistic symbolic model checker PRISM, correctness properties and different operation modes of the algorithm have been studied. Moreover, different model abstractions have been used in order to identify any inconsistencies or ambiguities, and to prove interesting properties for non-trivial, practical and relevant scenarios. Finally, since the biggest source of energy waste is the collision, this paper conducts a wide study of energy saving in this algorithm.

Cooperation without Synchronization: Practical Cooperative Relaying for Wireless Networks

Cooperative relay aims to realize the capacity of multi-antenna arrays in a distributed manner. However, the symbol-level synchronization requirement among distributed relays limits its use in practice. We propose to circumvent this barrier with a cross-layer protocol called Distributed Asynchronous Cooperation (DAC). With DAC, multiple relays can schedule concurrent transmissions with packet-level (hence coarse) synchronization. The receiver then extracts multiple versions of each relayed packet via a collision-resolution algorithm, thus realizing the diversity gain of cooperative communication. We demonstrate the feasibility of DAC by prototyping and testing it on the GNURadio/USRP software radio platform. To explore its relevance at the network level, we introduce a DAC-based medium access control (MAC) protocol, and a generic approach to integration of the DAC MAC/PHY layer into a typical routing algorithm. Considering the use of DAC for multiple network flows, we analyze the fundamental tradeoff between the improvement in diversity gain and the reduction in multiplexing opportunities. DAC is shown to improve the throughput and delay performance of lossy networks with intermediate link quality. Our analytical results have also been confirmed via network-level simulation with ns-2.

Probabilistic Model Checking: One Step Forward in Wireless Sensor Networks Simulation

A novel collision resolution algorithm for wireless sensor networks is formally analysed via probabilistic model checking. The algorithm called 2CS-WSN is specifically designed to be used during the contention phase of IEEE 802.15.4. Discrete time Markov chains (DTMCs) have been proposed as modelling formalism and the well-known probabilistic symbolic model checker PRISM is used to check some correctness properties and different operating modes and, furthermore, to collect some performance measures. Thus, all the benefits of formal verification and simulation are gathered. These correctness properties as well as practical and relevant scenarios for the real world have agreed with the algorithm designers.

A Development of 3-D Resolution Algorithm for Aircraft Collision Avoidance

Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) is designed to enhance safety in aircraft operations, by reducing the incidences of mid-air collision between aircraft. The current version of TCAS provides only vertical resolution advisory to the pilots, if an aircraft’s collision with another is predicted to be imminent, while efforts to include horizontal resolution advisory have been made, as well. This paper introduces a collision resolution algorithm, which includes both vertical and horizontal avoidance maneuvers of aircraft. Also, the paper compares between the performance of the proposed algorithm and that of algorithms with only vertical or horizontal avoidance maneuver of aircraft.

Transient Coordinator: a Collision Resolution Algorithm for Asynchronous MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) often employ asynchronous MAC scheduling, which allows each sensor node to wake up independently without synchronizing with its neighbor nodes. However, this asynchronous scheduling may not deal with collisions due to hidden terminals effectively. Although most of the existing asynchronous protocols exploit a random back-off technique to resolve collisions, the random back-off cannot secure a receiver from potentially repetitive collisions and may lead to a substantial increase in the packet latency. In this paper, we propose a new collision resolution algorithm called Transient Coordinator (TC) for asynchronous WSN MAC protocols. TC resolves a collision on demand by ordering senders` transmissions when a receiver detects a collision. To coordinate the transmission sequence both the receiver and the collided senders perform handshaking to collect the information and to derive a collision-free transmission sequence, which enables each sender to exclusively access the channel. According to the simulation results, our scheme can improve the average per-node throughput by up to 19.4% while it also reduces unnecessary energy consumption due to repetitive collisions by as much as 91.1% compared to the conventional asynchronous MAC protocols. This demonstrates that TC is more efficient in terms of performance, resource utilization, and energy compared to the random back-off scheme in dealing with collisions for asynchronous WSN MAC scheduling.

Optimal Dynamic Framed Slotted ALOHA Based Anti-collision Algorithm for RFID Systems

In Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) system, one of the most important issues that affect the data integrity is the collision resolution between the tags when these tags transmit their data to reader. In majority of tag anti-collision algorithm, Dynamic Framed Slotted Aloha (DFSA) has been employed as a popular collision resolution algorithm to share the medium when multiple tags respond to the reader's signal command. According to previous works, the performance of DFSA algorithm is optimal when the frame size equals to the number of un-identified tags inside the interrogation zone. However, based on our research results, when the frame size equals to number of tags, collision occurs frequently, and this severely affects the system performance because it causes power consumption and longer tag reading time. Since the proper choice of the frame size has a great influence on overall system performance, in this paper we develop an analytical model to study the system throughput of DFSA based RFID systems, and then we use this model to search for an optimal frame size that maximizes the system throughput based on current number of un-identified tags. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to evaluate its performance. Comparing with the traditional DFSA anti-collision algorithm, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme reaches better performance with respect to the tag collision probability and tag reading time.

A Reactive Cross Collision Exclusionary Backoff Algorithm in IEEE 802.11 Network

An inseparable challenge associated with every random access network is the design of an efficient Collision Resolution Algorithm (CRA), since collisions cannot be completely avoided in such network. To maximize the collision resolution efficiency of a popular CRA, namely Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB), we propose a reactive backoff algorithm. The proposed backoff algorithm is reactive in the sense that it updates the contention window based on the previously selected backoff value in the failed contention stage to avoid a typical type of collision, referred as cross-collision. Cross-collision would occur if the contention slot pointed by the currently selected backoff value appeared to be present in the overlapped portion of the adjacent (the previous and the current) windows. The proposed reactive algorithm contributes to significant performance improvements in the network since it offers a supplementary feature of Cross Collision Exclusion (XCE) and also retains the legacy collision mitigation features. We formulate a Markovian model to emulate the characteristics of the proposed algorithm. Based on the solution of the model, we then estimate the throughput and delay performances of WLAN following the signaling mechanisms of the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) considering IEEE 802.11b system parameters. We validate the accuracy of the analytical performance estimation framework by comparing the analytically obtained results with the results that we obtain from the simulation experiments performed in ns-2. Through the rigorous analysis, based on the validated model, we show that the proposed reactive cross collision exclusionary backoff algorithm significantly enhances the throughput and reduces the average packet delay in the network.