Load-aware routing in mesh networks: Models, algorithms and experimentation

In this paper we consider wireless mesh networks (WMNs) used to share the Internet connectivity of sparsely deployed fixed lines with heterogeneous capacity, ranging from ISP-owned high-speed links to subscriber-owned low-speed connections. If traffic is routed in the mesh without considering the load distribution and the bandwidth of Internet connections, some gateways may rapidly get overloaded because they are selected by too many mesh nodes. This may cause a significant reduction of the overall network capacity. To address this issue, in this paper we first develop a queuing network model that predicts the residual capacity of network paths, and identifies network bottlenecks. By taking advantage of this model, we design a novel Load-Aware Route Selection algorithm, named LARS, which improves the network capacity by allocating network paths to upstream Internet flows so as to ensure a more balanced utilization of wireless network resources and gateways’ Internet connections. Using simulations and a prototype implementation, we show that the LARS scheme significantly outperforms the shortest-path first routing protocol using a contention-aware routing metric, providing up to 240% throughput improvement in some network scenarios.     

A survey of inter-flow network coding in wireless mesh networks with unicast traffic

Wireless network performance is much restricted by the unreliability of the wireless channel and the competition among different flows for the shared network resources such as the bandwidth. Network coding is a technique that exploits the broadcast of the wireless channel and can effectively address these two restrictions to improve network performance. For example, with network coding, an intermediate node of multiple flows can encode packets from these flows into one mixed packet and serve these flows using only one transmission instead of multiple transmissions in the traditional way, thus mitigating the competition among flows. Inter-flow network coding (XNC), as a form of network coding, considers encoding packets from different flows, and it can benefit wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with either reliable or lossy links. In this paper, we present a survey on XNC in WMNs for unicast traffic, with various design factors related to XNC being covered. Specifically, our survey considers two types of WMNs, one with reliable links and the other with lossy links, and we study how XNC can be effectively utilized in both two types of WMNs. In addition to the benefits of XNC, we also present in this survey some drawbacks of applying XNC in WMNs. With this paper, we believe that readers will have a more thorough understanding of XNC on how it effectively mitigates the resource competition among flows and the channel unreliability problem in WMNs.     

SafeMesh: A wireless mesh network routing protocol for incident area communications

Reliable broadband communication is becoming increasingly important during disaster recovery and emergency response operations. In situations where infrastructure-based communication is not available or has been disrupted, an Incident Area Network needs to be dynamically deployed, i.e. a temporary network that provides communication services for efficient crisis management at an incident site. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with self-healing and self-configuring capabilities. These features, combined with the ability to provide wireless broadband connectivity at a comparably low cost, make WMNs a promising technology for incident management communications. This paper specifically focuses on hybrid WMNs, which allow both mobile client devices as well as dedicated infrastructure nodes to form the network and provide routing and forwarding functionality. Hybrid WMNs are the most generic and most flexible type of mesh networks and are ideally suited to meet the requirements of incident area communications. However, current wireless mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols do not perform well in hybrid WMN, and are not able to establish stable and high throughput communication paths. One of the key reasons for this is their inability to exploit the typical high degree of heterogeneity in hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh, the routing protocol presented in this paper, addresses the limitations of current mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols in the context of hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh is based on the well-known AODV routing protocol, and implements a number of modifications and extensions that significantly improve its performance in hybrid WMNs. This is demonstrated via an extensive set of simulation results. We further show the practicality of the protocol through a prototype implementation and provide performance results obtained from a small-scale testbed deployment.     

A routing protocol suitable for backhaul access in wireless mesh networks

This work proposes the Wireless-mesh-network Proactive Routing (WPR) protocol for wireless mesh networks, which are typically employed to provide backhaul access. WPR computes routes based on link states and, unlike current routing protocols, it uses two algorithms to improve communications in wireless mesh networks taking advantage of traffic concentration on links close to the network gateways. WPR introduces a controlled-flooding algorithm to reduce routing control overhead by considering the network topology similar to a tree. The main goal is to improve overall efficiency by saving network resources and avoiding network bottlenecks. In addition, WPR avoids redundant messages by selecting a subset of one-hop neighbors, the AMPR (Adapted MultiPoint Relay), needed to reach all two-hop ones. We first analyze the proposed algorithms compared with the algorithms used by OLSR for the same tasks in terms of running time, optimality, and number of routing messages. Results show that the algorithms proposed by WPR are more efficient than the algorithms used by OLSR in running time and number of routing messages. In addition, we also perform simulations to evaluate the performance of WPR. Results reveal that the aggregated throughput of WPR outperforms OLSR by up to 27% using a combination of web and backbone internal traffic despite our design assumption of traffic convergence toward gateways.     

Design and implementation of MobiSEC: A complete security architecture for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged recently as a technology for next-generation wireless networking. They consist of mesh routers and clients, where mesh routers are almost static and form the backbone of WMNs. WMNs provide network access for both mesh and conventional clients.In this paper we propose MobiSEC, a complete security architecture that provides both access control for mesh users and routers as well as a key distribution scheme that supports layer-2 encryption to ensure security and data confidentiality of all communications that occur in the WMN.MobiSEC extends the IEEE 802.11i standard exploiting the routing capabilities of mesh routers; after connecting to the access network as generic wireless clients, new mesh routers authenticate to a central server and obtain a temporary key that is used both to prove their credentials to neighbor nodes and to encrypt all the traffic transmitted on the wireless backbone links.A key feature in the design of MobiSEC is its independence from the underlying wireless technology used by network nodes to form the backbone. Furthermore, MobiSEC allows seamless mobility of both mesh clients and routers.MobiSEC has been implemented and integrated in MobiMESH, a WMN implementation that provides a complete framework for testing and analyzing the behavior of a mesh network in real-life environments. Moreover, extensive simulations have been performed in large-scale network scenarios using Network Simulator.Numerical results show that our proposed architecture considerably increases the WMN security, with a negligible impact on the network performance, thus representing an effective solution for wireless mesh networking.     

Performance evaluation for on-demand routing protocols based on OPNET modules in wireless mesh networks

In wireless networks, users expect to get access to the network securely and seamlessly to share the data flow of access points anytime and anywhere. However, either point-to-point or point-to-multipoint methods in traditional wireless networks make the network bandwidth decrease rapidly, which cannot meet the requirements of users. Recently, a new wireless broadband access network, wireless mesh networks (WMNs), has emerged. As one of the key technologies in WMNs, wireless routing protocols plays an important role in performance optimization of WMNs. Therefore, in this paper, we address the on-demand routing protocols by focusing on dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol and ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol in WMNs. Then, we use the OPNET modules to establish the simulation models of DSR and AODV protocols in WMNs. Simulation and results show that, DSR protocol that is based on the dynamic source routing is not suitable for wireless transmission, while AODV routing protocol that is based on the purpose-driven routing is suitable for wireless transmission with rapid change of network topology.     

A hierarchical architecture for detecting selfish behaviour in community wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of dedicated nodes called mesh routers which relay the traffic generated by mesh clients over multi-hop paths. In a community WMN, all mesh routers may not be managed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Limited capacity of wireless channels and lack of a single trusted authority in such networks can motivate mesh routers to behave selfishly by dropping relay traffic in order to provide a higher throughput to their own users. Existing solutions for stimulating cooperation in multi-hop networks use promiscuous monitoring or exchange probe packets to detect selfish nodes and apply virtual currency mechanism to compensate the cooperating nodes. These schemes fail to operate well when applied to WMNs which have a multi-radio environment with a relatively static topology. In this paper we, propose architecture for a community WMN which can detect selfish behaviour in the network and enforce cooperation among mesh routers. The architecture adopts a decentralized detection scheme by dividing the mesh routers into manageable clusters. Monitoring agents hosted on managed mesh routers monitor the behaviour of mesh routers in their cluster by collecting periodic reports and sending them to the sink agents hosted at the mesh gateways. To make the detection more accurate we consider the quality of wireless links. We present experimental results that evaluate the performance of our scheme.     

A divide-and-conquer approach for content replication in WMNs

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) extend Internet access in areas where the wired infrastructure is not available. A problem that arises is the congestion around gateways, delayed access latency and low throughput. Therefore, object replication and placement is essential for multi-hop wireless networks. Many replication schemes are proposed for the Internet, but they are designed for CDNs that have both high bandwidth and high server capacity, which makes them unsuitable for the wireless environment. Object replication has received comparatively less attention from the research community when it comes to WMNs. In this paper, we propose an object replication and placement scheme for WMNs. In our scheme, each mesh router acts as a replica server in a peer-to-peer fashion. The scheme exploits graph partitioning to build a hierarchy from fine-grained to coarse-grained partitions. The challenge is to replicate content as close as possible to the requesting clients and thus reduce the access latency per object, while minimizing the number of replicas. Using simulation tests, we demonstrate that our scheme is scalable, performing well with respect to the number of replica servers and the number of objects. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme has better performance compared to other replication schemes.     

On-demand channel reservation scheme for common traffic in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently gained momentum as a new broadband internet access technology to provide internet traffic. These networks have unique characteristics that make them different from ad hoc networks. These differences are as follows. First, WMNs are composed of static mesh routers that are equipped with multiple radio interfaces and turn each interface into a non-overlapping channel. These additional interfaces can create multiple concurrent links between adjacent nodes. Second, most of the traffic in WMNs is directed towards the gateway. Third, both local traffic and internet traffic are relayed by the mesh router to indeed destination. The Multi-Radio Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV-MR) developed to support multi-radio and does not take into account above-mentioned WMNs characteristics. In this paper, we propose an on-demand channel reservation scheme to reserve some of mesh router radio interfaces to support the gateway traffic while the remaining interfaces can be used to support the local traffic. Our scheme establishes high throughput paths for the traffic destined at the gateway, reduces the intra-flow and inter-flow interferences as well as to support full duplex node transmission.The scheme allows the gateway to assign a list of channels for each received gateway routing discovery message. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks.     

SRPM: Secure Routing Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Infrastructure Based Wireless Mesh Networks

Infrastructure based IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are new paradigm of low cost broadband technology. The large scale city-wide community-based coverage and multi-hop architecture are such characteristics which are vulnerable to network layer threats, and the adversary can exploit them for large scale degradation of the broadband services. So far many secure routing protocols have been proposed for ad-hoc networks, however, due to the different nature and characteristics; they cannot perform well in a WMN environment. In this paper, we discuss the limitations and challenges as well as propose an exclusive secure routing protocol for an infrastructure based wireless mesh (SRPM) network. SRPM is robust against a variety of multi-hop threats and performs well over a range of scenarios we tested.     

Routing protocols in wireless mesh networks: challenges and design considerations

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are an emerging technology that could revolutionize the way wireless network access is provided. The interconnection of access points using wireless links exhibits great potential in addressing the “last mile” connectivity issue. To realize this vision, it is imperative to provide efficient resource management. Resource management encompasses a number of different issues, including routing. Although a profusion of routing mechanisms has been proposed for other wireless networks, the unique characteristics of WMNs (e.g., wireless backbone) suggest that WMNs demand a specific solution. To have a clear and precise focus on future research in WMN routing, the characteristics of WMNs that have a strong impact on routing must be identified. Then a set of criteria is defined against which the existing routing protocols from ad hoc, sensor, and WMNs can be evaluated and performance metrics identified. This will serve as the basis for deriving the key design features for routing in wireless mesh networks. Thus, this paper will help to guide and refocus future works in this area.

Optimization models and methods for planning wireless mesh networks

In this paper novel optimization models are proposed for planning Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), where the objective is to minimize the network installation cost while providing full coverage to wireless mesh clients. Our mixed integer linear programming models allow to select the number and positions of mesh routers and access points, while accurately taking into account traffic routing, interference, rate adaptation, and channel assignment. We provide the optimal solutions of three problem formulations for a set of realistic-size instances (with up to 60 mesh devices) and discuss the effect of different parameters on the characteristics of the planned networks. Moreover, we propose and evaluate a relaxation-based heuristic for large-sized network instances which jointly solves the topology/coverage planning and channel assignment problems. Finally, the quality of the planned networks is evaluated under different traffic conditions through detailed system level simulations.     

基于流量模式和网络拓扑的网关部署算法

多并发流所引起的网络负载不均衡是无线网状网(wireless Mesh network,WMN)面临的一个挑战,部署网关是一种能缓解竞争节点负载的可行方案.针对这一问题,提出基于流量模式和网络拓扑的启发式网关部署算法.该算法利用节点在多种流量模式下所承载流量的平均值来估算节点的网络负载,并基于节点的网络负载和位置来选择网关,再根据特定的计算,分配节点给已知网关所管理的簇.实验结果表明,在不同流量模式和网络资源配置下,该算法均能有效地提高网络吞吐量、降低端到端延迟、减少路径长度.     

Application-aware scheduling for VoIP in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are seen as a means to provide last mile connections in Next Generation Networks (NGNs). Because of their auto-configuration capabilities and the low deployment cost WMNs are considered to be an efficient solution for the support of multiple voice, video and data services in NGNs. This paper looks at the optimal provision of resources in WMNs for Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic, which has strict performance requirements in terms of delay, jitter and packet loss. In WMNs, because of the challenges introduced by wireless multi-hop transmissions and limited resources, providing performance quality for VoIP comparable to the voice quality in the traditional circuit-switched networks is a major challenge.This paper analyses different scheduling mechanisms for TDMA-based access control in mesh networks as specified in the IEEE 802.16-2004 WiMAX standard. The performance of the VoIP applications when different scheduling mechanisms are deployed is analysed on a variety of topologies using ns-2 simulation and mathematical analysis. The paper concludes that on-demand scheduling of VoIP traffic – typically deployed in 802.11-based WMNs – is not able to provide the required VoIP quality in realistic mesh WiMAX network scenarios and is therefore not optimal from a network operator’s point of view. Instead, it is shown, that continuous scheduling is much better suited to serve VoIP traffic. The paper then proposes a new VoIP-aware resource coordination scheme and shows, through simulation, that the new scheme is scalable and provides good quality for VoIP service in a wide range of network scenarios. The results shown in the paper prove that the new scheme is resilient to increasing hop count, increasing number of simultaneous VoIP sessions and the background traffic load in the network. Compared to other resource coordination schemes the VoIP-aware scheduler significantly increases the number of supported calls.     

On the credit evolution of credit-based incentive protocols in wireless mesh networks

In designing wireless mesh networks (WMNs), incentive mechanisms are often needed so to encourage nodes to relay or forward packets for other nodes. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding on the interactions between the incentive mechanisms and the underlying protocols (e.g., shortest-path routing, ETX routing or back-pressure scheduling), and whether integration of these protocols will lead to a robust network, i.e., networks can sustain a given traffic workload. The objective of this paper is to present a general mathematical framework via stochastic difference equations to model the interaction of incentive mechanisms and various underlying protocols. We first present a credit evolution model to quantify the expected credit variation of each node in WMN, then use the norm of the expected credits variation to quantify the credit disparity. We also propose the use of differentiated pricing and show how it can achieve credit equality among nodes, resulting in a more robust network under different traffic loading. Our analytical framework can help researchers to model other incentive/routing protocols so to analyze the robustness of the underlying networks.     

On the end-to-end flow allocation and channel assignment in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks with partially overlapped channels

The performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be improved significantly with the increase in number of channels and radios. Despite the availability of multiple channels in several of the current wireless standards, only a small fraction of them are non-overlapping and many channels are partially overlapped. In this paper, we formulate the joint channel assignment and flow allocation problem for multi-channel multi-radio WMNs as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). Unlike most of the previous studies, we consider the case when both non-overlapped and partially overlapped channels are being used. We consider an objective of maximizing aggregate end-to-end throughput and minimizing queueing delay in the network, instead of the sum of link capacities, since the traffic characteristics of a multi-hop WMN are quite different from a single hop wireless network. Our static channel assignment algorithm incorporates network traffic information, i.e., it is load aware. Our formulation takes into consideration several important network parameters such as the transmission power of each node, path loss information, the signal to interference plus noise ratio at a node, and the frequency response of the filters used in the transmitter and receiver. We show by simulations that our MILP formulation makes efficient use of the spectrum, by providing superior channel assignments and flow allocations with the addition of partially overlapped channels, without the use of any additional spectrum. We also justify the need to consider alternative objective functions such as, minimizing average queueing in the network. We also propose a polynomially bounded heuristic algorithm to scale the proposed algorithm to bigger network topologies.     

无线Mesh网络中多信道生成树路由算法

无线Mesh网络是一种特殊的AdHoc网络。它易于部署、安装,能有效地构建无线骨干网,通常被用作宽带Internet接入和扩展无线LAN的覆盖范围。针对无线Mesh网络的特点,提出了一种不同于一般MANET路由协议的路由算法。该算法基于网络拓扑生成树,使用多个无重叠信道;在解决信道分配问题的同时,兼顾信道多样性和信道重用,更好地利用无线频谱资源,支持链路并行传输。     

A genetic algorithm-based system for wireless mesh networks: analysis of system data considering different routing protocols and architectures

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are attracting a lot of attention from wireless network researchers. Node placement problems have been investigated for a long time in the optimization field due to numerous applications in location science. In our previous work, we evaluated WMN-GA system which is based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to find an optimal location assignment for mesh routers. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of four different distributions of mesh clients for two WMN architectures considering throughput, delay and energy metrics. For simulations, we used ns-3, optimized link state routing (OLSR) and hybrid wireless mesh protocols (HWMP). We compare the performance for Normal, Uniform, Exponential and Weibull distributions of mesh clients by sending multiple constant bit rate flows in the network. The simulation results show that for HWM protocol the throughput of Uniform distribution is higher than other distributions. However, for OLSR protocol, the throughput of Exponential distribution is better than other distributions. For both protocols, the delay and remaining energy are better for Weibull distribution.     

无线mesh网络中效用与链路强度联合优化的覆盖多播

支持多播通信是无线mesh网络(WMNs)的一个重要应用.采用基于效用的定价机制,通过拉格朗日(Lagrange)对偶分解法获得一个基于价格的分布式算法.以该分布式算法为核心,作为mesh网络中数据流速率和链路强度调整的优化策略,每条链路根据自己的拥塞状况合理地定价,通过价格机制来调节链路的强度和数据流的速率,使网络净效用最大化.实验结果表明该算法是有效可行的.     

Complexity and design of QoS routing algorithms in wireless mesh networks

Quality of service (QoS) provisioning in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is an open issue to support emerging multimedia services. In this paper, we study the problem of QoS provisioning in terms of end-to-end bandwidth allocation in WMNs. It is challenging due to interferences in the networks. We consider widely used interference models and show that except a few special cases, the problem of finding a feasible path is NP-complete under the models. We propose a k-shortest path based algorithmic framework to solve this problem. We also consider the problem of optimizing network performance by on-line dynamic routing, and adapt commonly used conventional QoS routing metrics to be used in WMNs. We find the optimal solutions for these problems through formulating them as optimization models. A model is developed to check the existence of a feasible path and another to find the optimal path for a demand; moreover, an on-line optimal QoS routing algorithm is developed. Comparing the algorithms implemented by the proposed framework with the optimization models shows that our solution can find existing feasible paths with high probability, efficiently optimizes path lengths, and has a comparable performance to the optimal QoS routing algorithm. Furthermore, our results show that contrary to wireline networks, minimizing resource consumption should be preferred over load distribution even in lightly loaded WMNs.