Mesh Routers Research Articles

Efficient Key Management Mechanism with Trusted Gateways for Wireless Mesh Networks

Securing wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a crucial issue due to its intrinsic characteristics. Several endangered features might emerge due to the exposure of the networks to a diversity of medium access control (MAC) layers such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, false reply attacks, and other identity attacks. Against these attacks, the determination of existing techniques is insufficient to ensure the complete security solutions to protect the backbone network at multiple levels. As a result, effective, scalable, and integrated security solutions for WMNs are required. In WMNs, protecting legitimate gateway nodes and internal mesh routers against malicious attacks at the MAC layer remains a difficult problem. Our proposed trust-based security mechanism includes distributed authentication and deauthentication algorithms that validates backbone mesh routers as well as gateway nodes. Particularly, this proposed model targets DDoS attacks in the network. The proposed DDoS attack prevention mechanism (DAPM) uses distributed authentication and deauthentication algorithms to build trusted group heads for managing secure data communication in the network. Our research and practical results show that the proposed mechanism decreases the severity of malicious nodes and strengthens the security compared to existing centralized schemes such as digital signature authentication (DSA-Mesh, MENSA, Mobisec, and AHKM). The experimental solutions show the significance of the proposed work with 10% to 12% of better performance than the existing techniques.

An Efficient Method for Solving Router Placement Problem in Wireless Mesh Networks Using Multi-Verse Optimizer Algorithm.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are increasingly being used in a variety of applications. To fully utilize the network resources of WMNs, it is critical to design a topology that provides the best client coverage and network connectivity. This issue is solved by determining the best solution for the mesh router placement problem in WMN (MRP-WMN). Because the MRP-WMN is known to be NP-hard, it is typically solved using approximation algorithms. This is also why we are conducting this work. We present an efficient method for solving the MRP-WMN using the Multi-Verse Optimizer algorithm (MVO). A new objective function for the MRP-WMN is also proposed, which takes into account two important performance metrics, connected client ratio and connected router ratio. Experiment results show that when the MVO algorithm is applied to the MRP-WMN problem, the connected client ratio increases by 15.1%, 11.5%, and 5.9% on average, and the path loss reduces by 1.3, 0.9, and 0.6 dB when compared to the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), respectively.

Neighbor Coverage and Bandwidth Aware Multiple Disjoint Path Discovery in Wireless Mesh Networks

With the ease of appending new nodes without re-installing the whole network, the Internet of Things (IoT) builds several smart applications on Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). One of the important aspects of integrating WMN and smart IoT applications is to provide an energy-efficient and reliable routing protocol. Seeking the communication route that delivers the high-quality stream quickly over WMN is an important issue, but the maximum utilization of a single high-quality path leads to poor throughput and large communication delay, including route discovery and data forwarding delay. The broadcasting mechanism creates redundant transmissions of control packets into the network and reinitializes the blind route discovery process due to link disconnections leading to network resource constraints and high delay during the route discovery process. Moreover, the congestion in the communication route incurs data transmission latency. This paper proposes the Multiple Disjoint Path Determination (MDPD) mechanism based on-demand routing in WMN to formulate the path discovery and data transmission latency. Reducing the neighbor list into the uncommon neighbor set reduces the unnecessary latency in route discovery, and deriving high capacity multiple disjoint communication routes reduce the communication delay in the proposed work. The proposed work employs the queue dynamics in queuing delay, which mainly provides adaptability to the dynamics in network capacity and efficient diversity paths to the gateway node to infer the available bandwidth and optimize the network traffic. To fully utilize the advantage of heterogeneous routers, it disables the flooding of control packets across the stable mesh routers, excluding the initial route discovery process, because it enables the available route storage system in each mesh router. Hence, the proposed work efficiently supports wireless broadband internet access with reduced delay and control overhead. The simulation results demonstrate the fast detection of the multiple disjoint routes and data traffic optimization over the discovered disjoint routes in the proposed MDPD mechanism over WMN.

Improved Multi-Channel Multi-Interface Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are emerging as a potential technology to enhance the ability and availability of wireless networks. WMN consists of wireless mesh routers and terminals connected by wireless multi-hop communication. Besides, in WMN, each wireless node owns many interfaces, and each interface operates on many channels. However, effectively using multiple orthogonal channels and multiple interfaces to increase the performance of WMN and decrease the radio link transmission interference is of significant challenge. In this paper, we consider routing issues in WMN. Then, we proposed an on-demand routing protocol, adaptive multi-channel multi-interface operation, improved from the AODV protocol. This protocol is capable of effectively managing communication in the WMN and limited effects of co-channel interference. The simulation results on NS2 show that our proposed protocol improves throughput, delay and packet delivery rate compared to existing traditional protocols.

Federated Learning Over Multihop Wireless Networks With In-Network Aggregation

Communication limitation at the edge is widely recognized as a major bottleneck for federated learning (FL). Multi-hop wireless networking provides a cost-effective solution to enhance service coverage and spectrum efficiency at the edge, which could facilitate large-scale and efficient machine learning (ML) model aggregation. However, FL over multi-hop wireless networks has rarely been investigated. In this paper, we optimize FL over wireless mesh networks by taking into account the heterogeneity in communication and computing resources at mesh routers and clients. We present a framework that each intermediate router performs <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in-network</i> model aggregation before sending the data to the next hop, so as to reduce the outgoing data traffic and hence aggregate more models under limited communication resources. To accelerate model training, we formulate our optimization problem by jointly considering model aggregation, routing, and spectrum allocation. Although the problem is a non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming, we transform it into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), and develop a coarse-grained fixing procedure to solve it efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution approach, and the superiority of the in-network aggregation scheme over the counterpart without in-network aggregation.

PAAD (Partially adaptive and deterministic routing): A deadlock free congestion aware hybrid routing for 2D mesh network-on-chips.

Due to the increase in integrated circuit technology processing, there is intense flooding of transistors on Multi-processor System-on-chips, making communication a more complex and costly asset. To regulate communication in such a complex environment, Network-on-chip (NoC) came up as a versatile and inflating communication architecture for large SoCs. It tackled various on-chip communication problems and increased performance. It also provided a great power tradeoff for large-scale System-on-chips (SoCs). Routing plays a very vital role in NoCs performance. Routing should not cause any deadlocks in the network as it can degrade the performance. So deadlock-free routing has been and is instill a concern in NoCs. In this paper, we have introduced a novel deadlock-free congestion-aware routing namely PAAD (Partially adaptive and deterministic routing). It is a conjunction of partially adaptive and deterministic routing which switch with each other based on network congestion. Here we have divided a mesh into different diagonal zones and different algorithms are followed in each zone. When there is no congestion, deterministic routing is followed in each zone, and when there is congestion partially adaptive routing is followed. Hence it takes the advantage of both and enhances the overall efficiency. We have compared our model with different algorithms with regard to latency, throughput, and power performance factor for various traffic patterns. The results reveal that our algorithm performs best than the rest.

Localized Network Reconfiguration Plan for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract: Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. Because of their advantages over other wireless networks, WMNs are undergoing rapid progress and inspiring numerous applications. In multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) experience frequent link failures caused by channel interference, dynamic obstacles and/or applications’ bandwidth demands. These failures cause severe performance degradation in WMNs or require expensive, manual network management for their real-time recovery. This paper presents an Autonomous network Reconfiguration System (ARS) that enables a multi-radio WMN to autonomously recover from local link failures to preserve network performance. ARS also improves channel efficiency by more than 90% over the other recovery methods. During their lifetime, multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) experience frequent link failures caused by channel interference, dynamic obstacles, and/or applications’ bandwidth demands. These failures cause severe performance degradation in WMNs or require expensive manual network management for their real-time recovery. By using channel and radio diversities in WMNs, ARS generates necessary changes in local radio and channel assignments in order to recover from failures. Next, based on the thus-generated configuration changes, the system cooperatively reconfigures network settings among local mesh routers. ARS has been evaluated extensively through ns2-based simulation. Our evaluation results show that ARS outperforms existing failure-recovery schemes in improving channel-efficiency by more than 90% and in the ability of meeting the applications’ bandwidth demands by an average of 200%. Keywords: WMN, ARS, AODV, WCETT, ETT, RSVP, DSDV, ETX, ETOPE, BLC

Internet Traffic based Channel Selection in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks(WMNs) are the outstanding technology to facilitate wireless broadband Internet access to users. Routers in WMN have multiple radio interfaces to which multiple orthogonal/partially overlapping channels are assigned to improve the capacity of WMN. This paper is focused on channel selection problem in WMN since proper channel selection to radio interfaces of mesh router increases the performance of WMN. To access the Internet through WMN, the users have to associate with one of the mesh routers. Since most of the Internet Servers are still in wired networks, the major dominant traffic of Internet users is in downlink direction i.e. from the gateway of WMN to user. This paper proposes a new method of channel selection to improve the user performance in downlink direction of Internet traffic. The method is scalable and completely distributed solution to the problem of channel selection in WMN. The simulation results indicate the significant improvement in user performance.

Performance Evaluation of Chi-Square and Normal Distributions of Mesh Clients for WMNs Considering Five Router Replacement Methods

In our previous work, we implemented a simulation system to solve the node placement problem in WMNs considering Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Distributed Genetic Algorithm (DGA), called WMN-PSODGA. In this paper, we compare Chi-square and Normal distributions of mesh clients for different router replacement methods. The router replacement methods considered are Constriction Method (CM), Random Inertia Weight Method (RIWM), Linearly Decreasing Inertia Weight Method (LDIWM), Linearly Decreasing Vmax Method (LDVM) and Rational Decrement of Vmax Method (RDVM). The simulation results show that for both distributions, the mesh routers cover all mesh clients for all router replacement methods. In terms of load balancing, Normal distribution shows better results than Chi-square. The best router replacement method for this distribution is LDIWM. Thus, the best scenario is the Normal distribution of mesh clients with LDIWM as a router replacement method.

Collection tree-oriented mesh routing optimization for extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Routing optimization in wireless sensor networks facilitates to reduce the overhead of the maintaining of wireless sensor networks and extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Collection tree-based routing protocol, which does not require route discovery, has been widely used for low overheads of calculation and storage. However, with collection tree-based routing protocol, some nodes easily become the bottleneck points and quickly run out of the energy. To deal with this drawback, this article proposes a collection tree-oriented mesh routing strategy with cooperatively consuming the residual energy among the neighboring sensor nodes. The collection tree-oriented mesh routing is formulated into a linear programming problem with the purpose to maximize the network lifetime. By solving the optimization problem, the optimal mesh routing and data forwarding scheme is derived. Experimental simulations show that the proposed collection tree-oriented mesh routing optimization strategy can extend the network lifetime by more than 20%.

SR-WMN: Online Network Throughput Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks With Segment Routing

In this letter, we for the first time introduce segment routing (SR) to wireless mesh networks (WMNs) under the primary interference model, and try to obtain the upper bound of maximum network throughput from an online routing perspective. We first propose an SR-enabled WMN (SR-WMN) architecture. We then develop an online primal-dual algorithm with guaranteed worst case performance bound. We finally show via simulation that the proposed solution tends to be close to the optimum by configuring just over half of the wireless mesh routers (WMRs) to support SR.

Application driven routing for mesh based Network-on-Chip architectures

Expertise and intuition of chip design engineers supplemented by a unique design objective governs the choice of routing algorithm in Network-on-Chip(NoC) based systems. However, the same choices when considered for more than one performance parameter of the network, do not yield expected results since different applications exhibit different network performances for the same routing technique. Thus, we advocate use of an application pattern driven routing approach instead of the usual static routing strategies. In this paper, we propose an application pattern driven dynamic routing approach for NoC based systems while committed to optimize desired performance parameters. Our proposed methodology serves a dual purpose of improving the network performance of the NoC based system as well as relieving the design engineers from making the complex and tedious routing decisions. A machine learning based predictive approach is employed in our approach to classifying traffic patterns and it achieves 94.78 % accuracy while our overall proposed methodology achieves significant improvement in power consumption and throughput as compared to state of art works available in literature.

Optimal Coverage and Connectivity in Industrial Wireless Mesh Networks Based on Harris’ Hawk Optimization Algorithm

The placement of wireless mesh routers is a significant matter in enhancing the performance of a wireless mesh network. Therefore, it is essential that the mesh routers are optimally placed to guarantee strong connectivity and coverage for ensuring the best network accessibility. The importance of this issue has motivated the researchers to pursue more investigation on optimizing the networks&#x2019; performance. Various optimization algorithms have been developed in the literature to identify the trade-offs between network connectivity and client coverage. This work is aimed at implementing a novel application of Harris Hawk&#x2019;s Optimization (HHO) algorithm to optimally place mesh routers in a wireless mesh network so as to improve connectivity and coverage. The HHO seeks optimal routers placement that leads to maximizing the connection between routers and increasing the number of covered clients. In this study, three network configurations are used with sizes of 40, 60, and 100 mesh routers. The simulation results are statistically analyzed and compared to other population-based algorithms such as Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Gray Wolf&#x2019;s Optimization (GWO), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Moreover, the performance of HHO is compared with the state-of-the-art to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The simulation findings and statistical analysis confirm that the HHO outperforms the other algorithms in terms of network coverage and connectivity. The outcomes demonstrate that HHO can be considered an efficacious means to enhance the performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs).

Security in IoT Mesh Networks Based on Trust Similarity

Internet of Things (IoT) Mesh networks are becoming very popular to enable IoT devices to communicate without relying on dedicated PC services. Internet of Things (IoT) implicitly uses mesh networks. IoT connectivity to cloud and edge computing is in vogue. A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi-hop and distributed wireless network with mesh routers and mesh clients. Data originating from mesh clients are forwarded to destinations through mesh routers. In IoT Mesh networks, mesh clients are IoT devices. The crucial security issue with these networks is the lack of a trusted third party for validation. However, trust between nodes is required for the proper functioning of the network. WMNs are particularly vulnerable as they rely upon cooperative forwarding. In this research work, a secure and sustainable novel trust mechanism framework is proposed. This framework identifies the malicious nodes in WMNs and improves the nodes’ cooperation. The proposed framework or model differentiates between legitimate and malicious nodes using direct trust and indirect trust. Direct trust is computed based on the packet-forwarding behavior of a node. Mesh routers have multi radios, so the promiscuous mode may not work. A new two-hop mechanism is proposed to observe the neighbors’ packet forwarding behavior. Indirect trust is computed by aggregating the recommendations using the weighted D-S theory, where weight is computed using a novel similarity mechanism that correlates the recommendations received from different neighbors. Dynamic weight computation calculates the overall trust by using several interactions. We present the evaluations to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in the presence of packet drop/modification attacks, bad-mouthing attacks, on-off attacks, and collusion attacks by using the ns-2 simulator.

Solving the Mesh Router Nodes Placement in Wireless Mesh Networks Using Coyote Optimization Algorithm

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have rapid real developments during the last decade due to their simple implementation at low cost, easy network maintenance, and reliable service coverage. Despite these properties, the nodes placement of such networks imposes an important research issue for network operators and influences strongly the WMNs performance. This challenging issue is known to be an NP-hard problem, and solving it using approximate optimization algorithms (i.e. heuristic and meta-heuristic) is essential. This motivates our attempts to present an application of the Coyote Optimization Algorithm (COA) to solve the mesh routers placement problem in WMNs in this work. Experiments are conducted on several scenarios under different settings, taking into account two important metrics such as network connectivity and user coverage. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and merits of COA in finding optimal mesh routers locations when compared to other optimization algorithms such as Firefly Algorithm (FA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Bat Algorithm (BA), African Vulture Optimization Algorithm (AVOA), Aquila Optimizer (AO), Bald Eagle Search optimization (BES), Coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO), and Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA).

A web interface for WMN-PSODGA hybrid intelligent simulation system: performance evaluation for different mesh client distributions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to implement a web interface for a hybrid intelligent system. By using the implemented web interface, one can find optimal assignments of mesh routers in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). This study evaluates the implemented system considering three distributions of mesh clients to solve the node placement problem in WMNs.Design/methodology/approachThe node placement problem in WMNs is well known to be a computationally hard problem. Therefore, intelligent algorithms are used for solving this problem. The implemented system is a hybrid intelligent system based on meta-heuristics algorithms: particle swarm optimization (PSO) and distributed genetic algorithm (DGA). The proposed system is called WMN-PSODGA.FindingsThis study carried out simulations using the implemented simulation system. From the simulations results, it was found that the WMN-PSODGA system performs better for chi-square distribution of mesh clients compared with Weibull and exponential distributions.Research limitations/implicationsFor simulations, three different distributions of mesh clients were considered. In the future, other mesh client distributions, number of mesh nodes and communication distance need to be considered.Originality/valueThis research work, different from other research works, implemented a hybrid intelligent simulation system for WMNs. This study also implemented a web interface for the proposed system, which make the simulation system user-friendly.

Software-Defined Networking-Based Adaptive Routing for Multi-Hop Multi-Frequency Wireless Mesh

While multi-hop multi-frequency mesh has been extensively studied in the past decades, only several deployable and relatively bulky systems have been developed to support small numbers of hops under stationary settings. This paper presents a new Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based design of multi-hop multi-frequency mesh. A new lightweight hardware platform is developed to support adaptive routing and frequency selection, by modifying and integrating commercial-off-the-shelf WiFi modules. We also extend the celebrated Dijkstra's algorithm in support of the new multi-hop multi-frequency platform, where non-overlapping frequency bands are selected together with the routing paths by maintaining <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N^2$</tex-math></inline-formula> Dijkstra processes for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> frequency bands. These processes interact to recursively select the optimal upstream node and frequency for each downstream frequency of a node. Mininet-WiFi is used to evaluate the routing of the new system under dense network settings. The results indicate that our system improves the end-to-end throughput by taking background WiFi traffic into account and adaptively selecting the routes and frequencies, as compared to the shortest-path-based routing strategy.

A comparison study of chi-square and uniform distributions of mesh clients for different router replacement methods using WMN-PSODGA hybrid intelligent simulation system

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are gaining a lot of attention from researchers due to their advantages such as easy maintenance, low upfront cost and high robustness. Connectivity and stability directly affect the performance of WMNs. However, WMNs have some problems such as node placement problem, hidden terminal problem and so on. In our previous work, we implemented a simulation system to solve the node placement problem in WMNs considering Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Distributed Genetic Algorithm (DGA), called WMN-PSODGA. In this paper, we compare chi-square and uniform distributions of mesh clients for different router replacement methods. The router replacement methods considered are Constriction Method (CM), Random Inertia Weight Method (RIWM), Linearly Decreasing Inertia Weight Method (LDIWM), Linearly Decreasing Vmax Method (LDVM) and Rational Decrement of Vmax Method (RDVM). The simulation results show that for chi-square distribution the mesh routers cover all mesh clients for all router replacement methods. In terms of load balancing, the method that achieves the best performance is RDVM. When using the uniform distribution, the mesh routers do not cover all mesh clients, but this distribution shows good load balancing for four router replacement methods, with RIWM showing the best performance. The only method that shows poor performance for this distribution is LDIWM. However, since not all mesh clients are covered when using uniform distribution, the best scenario is chi-square distribution of mesh clients with RDVM as a router replacement method.

Accelerated PSO algorithm applied to clients coverage and routers connectivity in wireless mesh networks

The deployment of wireless mesh routers is a crucial task for improving network performance. Therefore, it should be taken seriously to ensure the network accessibility in terms of coverage and connectivity. This placement problem of mesh routers in wireless mesh networks represents an instance of multi-objective optimization problems with huge searching space to explore. In the literature, various optimization algorithms have been applied to find a trade-off between client coverage and network connectivity. To find an optimal mesh router placement, in this paper, we consider Accelerated particle swarm optimizer (APSO) due to its rapid convergence and low computational complexity compared to other population-based algorithms. We have experimentally evaluated it using different generated benchmarks of multiple configurations. The experimental results show that APSO algorithm provides very promising results compared to linearly decreasing weight particle swarm optimizer (LDWPSO).

Digital synthesis of programmable photonic integrated circuits

Programmable photonic waveguide meshes can be programmed into many different circuit topologies and thereby provide a variety of functions. Due to the complexity of the signal routing in a general mesh, a particular synthesis algorithm often only accounts for a specific function with a specific cell configuration. In this paper, we try to synthesize the programmable waveguide mesh to support multiple configurations with a more general digital signal processing platform. To show the feasibility of this technique, photonic waveguide meshes in different configurations (square, triangular and hexagonal meshes) are designed to realize optical signal interleaving with arbitrary duty cycles. The digital signal processing (DSP) approach offers an effective pathway for the establishment of a general design platform for the software-defined programmable photonic integrated circuits. The use of well-developed DSP techniques and algorithms establishes a link between optical and electrical signals and makes it convenient to realize the computer-aided design of optics–electronics hybrid systems.