Multi-hop Routing Protocol Research Articles

Cognitive Networks Achieve Throughput Scaling of a Homogeneous Network

We study two distinct, but overlapping, networks that operate at the same time, space, and frequency. The first network consists of $n$ randomly distributed \emph{primary users}, which form either an ad hoc network, or an infrastructure-supported ad hoc network with $l$ additional base stations. The second network consists of $m$ randomly distributed, ad hoc secondary users or cognitive users. The primary users have priority access to the spectrum and do not need to change their communication protocol in the presence of secondary users. The secondary users, however, need to adjust their protocol based on knowledge about the locations of the primary nodes to bring little loss to the primary network's throughput. By introducing preservation regions around primary receivers and avoidance regions around primary base stations, we propose two modified multihop routing protocols for the cognitive users. Base on percolation theory, we show that when the secondary network is denser than the primary network, both networks can simultaneously achieve the same throughput scaling law as a stand-alone network. Furthermore, the primary network throughput is subject to only a vanishingly fractional loss. Specifically, for the ad hoc and the infrastructure-supported primary models, the primary network achieves sum throughputs of order $n^{1/2}$ and $\max\{n^{1/2},l\}$, respectively. For both primary network models, for any $\delta>0$, the secondary network can achieve sum throughput of order $m^{1/2-\delta}$ with an arbitrarily small fraction of outage. Thus, almost all secondary source-destination pairs can communicate at a rate of order $m^{-1/2-\delta}$.

EPet: A Physical Game Based on Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper describes ePet, a novel multi-player physical game based on the WSN (Wireless Sensor Network). ePet shifts the traditional virtual pet games to the real world, featuring with the popular RPG (Role-Playing Game) elements. The game, capitalizing on the wireless communication, mobile computing, and sensing ability, can be played both indoors and outdoors, and thus gives players a new exciting gaming experience that profits by the blend of real and virtual game elements. The physical game acquires physical interactions among players, which can bring exciting and novel features to the game and more importantly, avoids some problems caused by traditional computer games such as health problems. The WSN is a promising technology for developing physical games. Although there is already some research and applications of WSN based physical games, the major advantages of the WSN (e.g. wireless communication, mobile computing, and sensing ability) are not fully cultivated in these gaming applications. ePet, which takes good advantages of both the WSN and traditional computer games, simulates a pet both indoors and outdoors. The pet has two life modes: Peaceful Life Mode (PLM) and Aggressive Life Mode (ALM). In the PLM, ePet simulates the physiological activities of a real pet such as hunger and easily getting flu when it is cold in the real world. Moreover, the pet can date with other pets to increase its physiological values. In the ALM, the pet is a character of an RPG controlled by the player and the pet can have a fight with other pets, from which the pet gains experience for level up. This ALM is similar to the computer RPG games but relatively novel in WSN based games. All of the above features are enabled by the WSN technology. For the two life modes, a friend-making protocol and an RPG battle protocol are designed respectively. The architecture design and implementation of ePet are described in detailed. Unlike traditional WSN based games, ePet does not need a centralized base station to organize the network. To implement a self-adaptive wireless sensor network in which each node has a similar functionality, and solve the network conflict problems in the WSN communications, a multi-hop communication routing protocol is designed for ePet. Furthermore, a PC application was developed as the game interface, from which players can check out the ePet's properties and interact with ePet. It makes ePet more attractive than traditional WSN based games without losing WSN's advantages.

Maximizing Communication Concurrency via Link-Layer Packet Salvaging in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Carrier-sense medium access control (MAC) protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) avoid collisions by holding up pending transmission requests when a carrier signal is observed above a certain threshold. However, this often results in unnecessarily conservative communication, thus making it difficult to maximize the utilization of the spatial spectral resource. This paper shows that a higher aggregate throughput can be achieved by allowing more concurrent communications and adjusting the communication distance on the fly, which needs provisions for the following two areas. On the one hand, carrier sense-based MAC protocols do not allow aggressive communication attempts when they are within the carrier senseable area. On the other hand, the communication distance is generally neither short nor adjustable because multihop routing protocols strive for providing minimum hop paths. This paper proposes a new MAC algorithm, called multiple access with salvation army (MASA), which adopts less sensitive carrier sensing to promote more concurrent communications and adjusts the communication distance adaptively via packet salvaging at the MAC layer. Extensive simulation based on the ns-2 has shown MASA to outperform the DCF, particularly in terms of delay. We also discuss the implementation of MASA based on the DCF specification

Clustering and multi-hop routing with power control in wireless sensor networks

Clustering routing protocols excel in several aspects of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This article proposes a clustering and multihop routing protocol (CMRP). In CMRP, a node independently makes its decision to compete for becoming a cluster head or join a cluster, according to its residual energy and average broadcast power of all its neighbors. To minimize the power consumption of the cluster head, CMRP sends the data in a power-aware multihop manner to the base station (BS) through a quasi-fixed route (QFR). In addition, CMRP presents a transmission power control algorithm with dynamic intercluster neighbor position estimation (DCNPE) to save energy. Simulation results show that the performance of CMRP is better than the hybrid, energy-efficient, distributed clustering approach (HEED). In the best case, CMRP increases the sensor network lifetime by 150.2%.

An On-Demand Routing Protocol with Backtracking for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is characterized by multi-hop wireless links and frequent node mobility. Communication between non-neighboring nodes requires a multi-hop routing protocol to establish a route. But, the route often breaks due to mobility. The source must rediscover a new route for delivering the data packets. This wastes the resources that are limited in MANET. In this paper, a new on-demand routing protocol is proposed, named on-demand routing protocol with backtracking (ORB), for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks. We use the multiple routes and cache data technique to reduce the rediscovery times and overhead. After executing the route discovery phase, we find out a set of nodes, named checkpoint, which has the multiple routes to the destination. When a checkpoint node receives a data packet, it caches this data packet in its buffer within a specific time period. When a node detects a broken route during the data packets delivery or receives an error packet, it will either recover the broken route or reply the error packet to the source. If a node can not forward the data packet to the next node, it replies an error packet to the source. This packet is backtracking to search a checkpoint to redeliver the data packet to the destination along other alternate routes. The main advantage of ORB is to reduce the flooding search times, maybe just delay and cost while a route has broken. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can increase the performance of delivery but reduce the overhead efficiently comparing with that of AODV based routing protocols.

Military multi-hop routing protocol

Military tactical network is one of the most important applications of ad hoc network. Currently the existing routing protocols are put forward based on the simple and universal network model which has the ability of multi-hop routing but cannot work efficiently in the special military applications. The narrow bandwidth and limited energy of the wireless network make general routing protocols seem to be more redundant. In order to satisfy military needs properly, this letter makes a detailed analysis of physical nodes and traffic distribution in military network, uses cross-layer design concept for reference, combines traffic characteristic of application layer with routing protocol design. It categorized routing problem as crucial routes and non-crucial routes which adopted separate maintenance methods. It not only realizes basic transmission function but also works efficiently. It is quite fit for military application.

Trading latency for energy in densely deployed wireless ad hoc networks using message ferrying

Wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have the potential for use in important application environments, such as remote environmental monitoring, where energy resources are limited. Efficient power management is necessary to allow these networks to operate over a long period of time. One of the key factors affecting the design of power management mechanisms is the routing protocol in use within the network. In this paper, we investigate the Message ferrying ( MF) routing paradigm as a means to save energy while trading off data delivery delay. In MF, special nodes called ferries move around the deployment area to deliver messages for nodes. While this routing paradigm has been developed mainly to deliver messages in partitioned networks, here we explore its use in a connected MANET. The reliance on the movement of ferries to deliver messages increases the delivery delay if a network is not partitioned. However, delegating message delivery to ferries provides the opportunity for nodes to save energy by aggressively disabling their radios when ferries are far away. To exploit this feature, we present a power management framework, in which nodes switch their power management modes based on knowledge of ferry location. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using ns-2 simulations and compare it with a multihop routing protocol, dynamic source routing (DSR). Our simulation results show that MF achieves energy savings as high as 95% compared to DSR without power management and still delivers more than 98% of messages. In contrast, a power-managed DSR delivers many fewer messages than MF to achieve similar energy savings. In the scenario of heavy traffic load, the power-managed DSR delivers less than 20% of messages. MF also shows robust performance for highly mobile nodes, while the performance of DSR suffers significantly. Thus, delay tolerant applications can use MF rather than a multihop routing protocol to save energy efficiently when both routing approaches are available.

Evaluating a cross-layer approach for routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks is challenging due to the unreliable characteristics of the wireless medium. Traditional routing paradigms are not able to propose an efficient solution to this problem. Further, Gupta et al. demonstrated that the average throughput capacity per node of a wireless multi-hop network decreases as 1/n, where n is the number of nodes in the network. Recent studies have shown that a cross-layer approach is a promising solution to get closer to the theoretic throughput capacity bound. Cross-layer solutions have been already proposed either for specific TDMA/CDMA networks or for power-efficient routing protocols. These proposals are strongly MAC dependent, or suffer from targeting a steady state offering the best trade-off performance. In this paper, the problem we tackle in a more general context, disregarding the specific MAC and Physical layers technologies, can be formulated as follows: How to design a routing algorithm able to increase the average throughput capacity experienced by Wireless Mesh Networks? Starting from a theoretic result, we analyze the gain that a cross-layer approach can deliver, the metrics suitable to improve throughput capacity, and the power control policy that reduces interference. We take a MAC independent approach, focusing on the general characteristics of wireless links, targeting the improvement of throughput capacity in Wireless Mesh Networks. Our proposal performs path selection and power optimization based on three metrics, namely physical transmission rate, interference, and packet error rate. Performances are thoroughly analyzed and evaluated by extensive simulations, with both TCP and UDP traffic, and compared to other multi-hop routing protocols. For both kind of traffic, the simple heuristic we propose here allows to double the average throughput the network is able to route.

Randomized dynamic route maintenance for adaptive routing in multihop mobile ad hoc networks

Several approaches have been proposed for designing multihop routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). Many of them adopt a method, called flooding, to discover a routing path. Due to the time-varying nature of the route in MANET, the discovered route needs to be dynamically maintained for optimality in terms of traffic load, hop-distance, and resource usage. It is easy to see that flooding incurs significant overhead and hence is inappropriate for the dynamic route maintenance. In this paper we propose a randomized, dynamic route maintenance scheme for adaptive routing in MANET. The scheme makes use of a nomadic control packet (NCP) which travels through the network based on a random walk, and collects its stopovers as a traversal record. The NCP uses the traversal record to probabilistically provide the nodes with clue for routing path updates. From the clue, the nodes can find the routing path update information that is up-to-date and optimal (less-loaded and shorter), thereby adapting to the dynamic network topology and traffic load conditions. We present an analytical model for measuring the effectiveness of NCP in terms of its frequency of visits and probability of finding the clue from the NCP traversal record. The proposed randomized scheme serves as a routing protocol supporting layer and can be easily applied with minimum modifications to the existing on-demand routing protocols such as AODV and DSR. In our experimental study, we modified the AODV protocol to maintain routing paths using NCPs’ traversal record. Simulation results show that NCPs help the routing protocol to notably reduce average end-to-end packet delay with increased route optimality and better control on traffic congestion.