Overlapping particle swarms for energy-efficient routing in sensor networks

Sensor networks are traditionally built using battery-powered, collaborative devices. These sensor nodes do not rely on dedicated infrastructure services (e.g., routers) to relay data. Rather, a communal effort is employed where the sensor nodes both generate data as well as forward data for other nodes. A routing protocol is needed in order for the sensors to determine viable paths through the network, but routing protocols designed for wired networks and even ad hoc networks are not sufficient given the energy overhead needed to operate them. We propose an energy-aware routing protocol, based on overlapping swarms of particles, that offers reliable path selection while reducing the energy consumption for the route selection process. Our particle-based routing with overlapping swarms for energy-efficiency algorithm shows promise in extending the life of battery-powered networks while still providing robust routing functionality to maintain network reliability.     

A region-based routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding-based route discovery is widely assumed in existing routing protocols of wireless ad hoc networks. Network-wide flooding enables the discovery of optimal routes from sources to destinations; however, as all network nodes are required to participate in the relays of route request packets, substantial control overhead is inevitable. Some efficient broadcast schemes can suppress redundant packet relays, but they often suppress the discovery of optimal routes, too. In this article we propose to dynamically create a prerouting region between each source-destination pair and limit the propagations of route request packets only within this region. The prerouting region effectively restricts route discovery activities to the nodes that most likely constitute the optimal or near-optimal routes. Consequently, not only is route construction overhead significantly reduced; route optimality is also guaranteed. The article presents a region-based routing (REGR) protocol covering both new route formation cases and route update cases. Simulations show that our protocol is particularly beneficial to dense and large-scale mobile ad hoc networks.     

An optimised resource aware approach to information collection in ad hoc networks

In ad hoc networks there is a need for all-to-one protocols that allow for information collection or “sensing” of the state of an ad hoc network and the nodes that comprise it. Such protocols may be used for service discovery, auto-configuration, network management, topology discovery or reliable flooding. There is a parallel between this type of sensing in ad hoc networks and that of sensor networks. However, ad hoc networks and sensor networks differ in their application, construction, characteristics and constraints. The main priority of sensor networks is for the flow of data from sensors back to a sink, but in an ad hoc network this may be of secondary importance. Hence, protocols suitable to sensor networks are not necessarily suitable to ad hoc networks and vice versa. We propose, Resource Aware Information Collection (RAIC), a distributed two phased resource aware approach to information collection in ad hoc networks. RAIC utilises a resource aware optimised flooding mechanism to both disseminate requests and initialise a backbone of resource suitable nodes responsible for relaying replies back to the node collecting information. RAIC in the process of collecting information from all nodes in an ad hoc network is shown to consume less energy and introduce less overhead compared with Directed Diffusion and a brute force approach. Importantly, over multiple successive queries (in an energy constrained environment), the use of resource awareness allows for the load of relaying to be distributed to those nodes most suitable, thereby extending the lifetime of the network.     

SMORT: Scalable multipath on-demand routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Increasing popularity and availability of portable wireless devices, which constitute mobile ad hoc networks, calls for scalable ad hoc routing protocols. On-demand routing protocols adapt well with dynamic topologies of ad hoc networks, because of their lower control overhead and quick response to route breaks. But, as the size of the network increases, these protocols cease to perform due to large routing overhead generated while repairing route breaks. We propose a multipath on-demand routing protocol (SMORT), which reduces the routing overhead incurred in recovering from route breaks, by using secondary paths. SMORT computes fail-safe multiple paths, which provide all the intermediate nodes on the primary path with multiple routes (if exists) to destination. Exhaustive simulations using GloMoSim with large networks (2000 nodes) confirm that SMORT is scalable, and performs better even at higher mobility and traffic loads, when compared to the disjoint multipath routing protocol (DMRP) and ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol.     

Optimised relay selection for route discovery in reactive routing

On-demand routing protocols have the potential to provide scalable information delivery in large ad hoc networks. The novelty of these protocols is in their approach to route discovery, where a route is determined only when it is required by initiating a route discovery procedure. Much of the research in this area has focused on reducing the route discovery overhead when prior knowledge of the destination is available at the source or by routing through stable links. Hence, many of the protocols proposed to date still resort to flooding the network when prior knowledge about the destination is un-available. This paper proposes a novel routing protocol for ad hoc networks, called On-demand Tree-based Routing Protocol (OTRP). This protocol combines the idea of hop-by-hop routing (as used by AODV) with an efficient route discovery algorithm called Tree-based Optimised Flooding (TOF) to improve scalability of ad hoc networks when there is no prior knowledge about the destination. To achieve this in OTRP, route discovery overheads are minimised by selectively flooding the network through a limited set of nodes, referred to as branching nodes. The key factors governing the performance of OTRP are theoretically analysed and evaluated, including the number of branch nodes, location of branching nodes and number of Route REQuest (RREQ) retries. It was found that the performance of OTRP (evaluated using a variety of well-known metrics) improves as the number of branching nodes increases and the number of consumed RREQ retries is reduced. Additionally, theoretical analysis and simulation results shows that OTRP outperforms AODV, DYMO, and OLSR with reduced overheads as the number of nodes and traffic load increases.     

Providing Fault-Tolerant Ad hoc Routing Service in Adversarial Environments

Most existing designs of ad hoc networks are based on the assumption of non-adversarial environments, where each node in the network is cooperative and well-behaved. When misbehaving nodes exist in the network, the performance of current routing protocols degrades significantly. Since ad hoc networks, consisting of autonomous nodes, are open and distributed in nature, maintaining a fault-free network environment is extremely difficult and expensive. In this paper, we propose a new routing service named best-effort fault-tolerant routing (BFTR). The design goal of BFTR is to provide packet routing service with high delivery ratio and low overhead in presence of misbehaving nodes. Instead of judging whether a path is good or bad, i.e., whether it contains any misbehaving node, BFTR evaluates the routing feasibility of a path by its end-to-end performance (e.g. packet delivery ratio and delay). By continuously observing the routing performance, BFTR dynamically routes packets via the most feasible path. BFTR provides an efficient and uniform solution for a broad range of node misbehaviors with very few security assumptions. The BFTR algorithm is evaluated through both analysis and extensive simulations. The results show that BFTR greatly improves the ad hoc routing performance in the presence of misbehaving nodes.     

Analysis of tree‐based multicast routing in wireless sensor networks with varying network metrics

Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks are emerging with advances in electronic device technology, wireless communications and mobile computing with flexible and adaptable features. Routing protocols act as an interface between the lower and higher layers of the network protocol stack. Depending on the size of target nodes, routing techniques are classified into unicast, multicast and broadcast protocols. In this article, we give analysis and performance evaluation of tree‐based multicast routing in wireless sensor networks with varying network metrics. Geographic multicast routing (GMR) and its variations are used extensively in sensor networks. Multicast routing protocols considered in the analytical model are GMR, distributed GMR, demand scalable GMR, hierarchical GMR, destination clustering GMR and sink‐initiated GMR. Simulations are given with comparative analysis based on varying network metrics such as multicast group size, number of sink nodes, average multicast latency, number of clusters, packet delivery ratio, energy cost ratio and link failure rate. Analytical results indicate that wireless sensor network multicast routing protocols operate on the node structure (such as hierarchical, clustered, distributed, dense and sparse networks) and application specific parameters. Simulations indicate that hierarchical GMR is used for generic multicast applications and that destination clustering GMR and demand scalable GMR are used for distributed multicast applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CARD: A Contact-based Architecture for Resource Discovery in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Traditional protocols for routing in ad hoc networks attempt to obtain optimal or shortest paths, and in doing so may incur significant route discovery overhead. Such approaches may be appropriate for routing long-lived transfers where the initial cost of route discovery may be amortized over the life of the connection. For short-lived connections, however, such as resource discovery and small transfers, traditional shortest path approaches may be quite inefficient. In this paper we propose a novel architecture, CARD, for resource discovery in large-scale wireless ad hoc networks. Our mechanism is suitable for resource discovery as well as routing very small data transfers or transactions in which the cost of data transfer is much smaller than the cost of route discovery. Our architecture avoids expensive mechanisms such as global flooding and complex hierarchy formation and does not require any location information. In CARD resources within the vicinity of a node, up to a limited number of hops, are discovered using a proactive scheme. For resources beyond the vicinity, each node maintains a few distant nodes called contacts. Contacts help in creating a small world in the network and provide an efficient way to query for distant resources. Using contacts, the network view (or reachability) of the nodes increases, reducing the discovery overhead and increasing the success rate. On the other hand, increasing the number of contacts also increases control overhead. We study such trade-off in depth and present mechanisms for contact selection and maintenance that attempt to increase reachability with reduced overhead. Our schemes adapt gracefully to network dynamics and mobility using soft-state periodic mechanisms to validate and recover paths to contacts. Our simulation results show that CARD is scalable and can be configured to provide desirable performance for various network sizes. Comparisons with other schemes show overhead savings reaching over 93% (vs. flooding) and 80% (vs. bordercasting or zone routing) for high query rates in large-scale networks.     

一种基于跨层设计和蚁群优化的自组网负载均衡路由协议

针对大部分现有替代路径共同存在的替代路径老化和构建效率问题,本文提出了一种基于跨层设计和蚁群优化的负载均衡路由协议(CALRA),利用蚁群优化算法特有的信息素挥发方法实现对替代路径的老化问题,将蚁群优化和跨层优化方法结合起来解决自组网中的负载均衡问题,通过双向逐跳更新的方式较好的解决了替代路径构建效率问题,并将蚂蚁在所经过的各中间节点为路由表带来的信息素增量映射为蚂蚁离开源节点的距离、移动过程中所遇到的节点拥塞程度、节点当前信息素浓度和节点移动速度等各协议层的统计信息的函数,通过对各种信息所对应的参数赋予不同加权值的方法对概率路由表进行控制,改善了自组网中现有基于蚁群优化的路由协议中普遍存在的拥塞问题、捷径问题、收敛速度问题和引入的路由开销问题.仿真表明,CALRA在分组成功递交率、路由开销、端到端平均时延等方面具有优良性能,能很好地实现网络中的业务负载均衡.     

ABRP: Anchor-based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks, which do not rely on any infrastructure such as access points or base stations, can be deployed rapidly and inexpensively even in situations with geographical or time constraints. Ad hoc networks are attractive in both military and disaster situations and also in commercial uses like sensor networks or conferencing. In ad hoc networks, each node acts both as a router and as a host. The topology of an ad hoc network may change dynamically, which makes it difficult to design an efficient routing protocol. As more and more wireless devices connect to the network, it is important to design a scalable routing protocol for ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present Anchor-based Routing Protocol (ABRP), a scalable routing protocol for ad hoc networks. It is a hybrid routing protocol, which combines the table-based routing strategy with the geographic routing strategy. However, GPS (Global Positioning System) (Kaplan, Understanding GPS principles and Applications, Boston: Artech House publishers, 1996) support is not needed. ABRP consists of a location-based clustering protocol, an intra-cell routing protocol and an inter-cell routing protocol. The location-based clustering protocol divides the network region into different cells. The intra-cell routing protocol routes packets within one cell. The inter-cell routing protocol is used to route packets between nodes in different cells. The combination of intra-cell and inter-cell routing protocol makes ABRP highly scalable, since each node needs to only maintain routes within a cell. The inter-cell routing protocol establishes multiple routes between different cells, which makes ABRP reliable and efficient. We evaluate the performance of ABRP using ns2 simulator. We simulated different size of networks from 200 nodes to 1600 nodes. Simulation results show that ABRP is efficient and scales well to large networks. ABRP combines the advantages of multi-path routing strategy and geographic routing strategy—efficiency and scalability, and avoids the burden—GPS support.     

Efficient on-demand routing for mobile ad hoc wireless access networks

In this paper, we consider a mobile ad hoc wireless access network in which mobile nodes can access the Internet via one or more stationary gateway nodes. Mobile nodes outside the transmission range of the gateway can continue to communicate with the gateway via their neighboring nodes over multihop paths. On-demand routing schemes are appealing because of their low routing overhead in bandwidth restricted mobile ad hoc networks, however, their routing control overhead increases exponentially with node density in a given geographic area. To control the overhead of on-demand routing without sacrificing performance, we present a novel extension of the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol, called LB-AODV, which incorporates the concept of load-balancing (LB). Simulation results show that as traffic increases, our proposed LB-AODV routing protocol has a significantly higher packet delivery fraction, a lower end-to-end delay and a reduced routing overhead when compared with both AODV and gossip-based routing protocols.     

A dynamic cross-layer routing protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

A new cross-layer routing protocol, named Dynamic Packet Guidance (DPG), is introduced for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Simulation results show that DPG is quite useful for usage in dense networks of mobile nodes, with medium-to-high speeds, and low-to-medium load. In these scenarios, DPG provides a superior performance compared to several well-known ad hoc routing protocols. The low end-to-end delay and smaller overhead that DPG achieves in such scenarios positively impacts the scalability of MANETs and reduces the energy requirements of nodes in such networks. DPG also shows immunity to failing nodes, as it operates consistently almost independently of failing nodes up to a certain ratio.     

PACMAN: passive autoconfiguration for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) enable the communication between mobile nodes via multihop wireless routes without depending on a communication infrastructure. In contrast to infrastructure-based networks, MANET's support autonomous and spontaneous networking and, thus, should be capable of self-organization and -configuration. This paper presents passive autoconfiguration for mobile ad hoc network (PACMAN), a novel approach for the efficient distributed address autoconfiguration of mobile ad hoc networks. Special features of PACMAN are the support for frequent network partitioning and merging, and very low protocol overhead. This is accomplished by using cross-layer information derived from ongoing routing protocol traffic, e.g., address conflicts are detected in a passive manner based on anomalies in routing protocol traffic. Furthermore, PACMAN assigns Internet protocol (IP) addresses in a way that enables their compression, which can significantly reduce the routing protocol overhead. The performance of PACMAN is analyzed in detail based on various simulation results.     

QoS routing based on multi-class nodes for mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we present a new quality of service (QoS) routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Most of the existing routing protocols assume homogeneous nodes in MANETs, i.e., all nodes have the same communication capabilities and characteristics. However, in many ad hoc networks, nodes are not the same. Some nodes have longer transmission range, larger transmission bandwidth, and are more reliable and robust than other nodes. We take advantage of the non-homogeneous property to design more efficient QoS routing protocol. And node location information is used to aid routing. We also develop a new algorithm to calculate end-to-end bandwidth for a given path. Our QoS routing protocol contains end-to-end bandwidth calculation and bandwidth reservation. QoS route is discovered and setup only when it is needed. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the good performance of the QoS routing protocol.     

RBR: a region-based routing protocol for mobile nodes in hybrid ad hoc networks

In hybrid ad hoc networks, mobile nodes can communicate not only with each other in a self-organizing manner, but also with nodes on wired networks for extensive information retrieval and dissemination. In this article we consider efficient routing operations between any two nodes in an ad hoc network that is linked to wired networks by an access point. To build routes with low routing overhead efficiently, we develop a new routing scheme of region-based routing (RBR), which utilizes hop counts between mobile nodes and the access point to localize a route discovery within a limited topological region. Limiting the region of route discovery results in fewer routing messages and therefore reduces routing overhead. Simulation results show that the RBR scheme greatly reduces routing overhead while preserving a high rate of success for route discovery to the destination     

Energy efficient multi-channel media access control for dense wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

Traditional single-channel MAC protocols for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks favor energy-efficiency over throughput. More recent multi-channel MAC protocols display higher throughput but less energy efficiency. In this article we propose NAMAC, a negotiator-based multi-channel MAC protocol in which specially designated nodes called negotiators maintain the sleeping and communication schedules of nodes within their communication ranges in static wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Negotiators facilitate the assignation of channels and coordination of communications windows, thus allowing individual nodes to sleep and save energy. We formally define the problem of finding the optimal set of negotiators (i.e., minimizing the number of selected negotiators while maximizing the coverage of the negotiators) and prove that the problem is NP-Complete. Accordingly, we propose a greedy negotiator-election algorithm as part of NAMAC. In addition, we prove the correctness of NAMAC through a rigorous model checking and analyze various characteristics of NAMAC—the throughput of NAMAC, impact of negotiators on network capacity, and storage and computational overhead. Simulation results show that NAMAC, at high network loads, consumes 36 % less energy while providing 25 % more throughput than comparable state-of-art multi-channel MAC protocols for ad hoc networks. Additionally, we propose a lightweight version of NAMAC and show that it outperforms (55 % higher throughput with 36 % less energy) state-of-art MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks.     

Secure routing in mobile wireless ad hoc networks

We discuss several well known contemporary protocols aimed at securing routing in mobile wireless ad hoc networks. We analyze each of these protocols against requirements of ad hoc routing and in some cases identify fallibilities and make recommendations to overcome these problems so as to improve the overall efficacy of these protocols in securing ad hoc routing, without adding any significant computational or communication overhead.     

Gossip-based ad hoc routing

Many ad hoc routing protocols are based on some variant of flooding. Despite various optimizations of flooding, many routing messages are propagated unnecessarily. We propose a gossiping-based approach, where each node forwards a message with some probability, to reduce the overhead of the routing protocols. Gossiping exhibits bimodal behavior in sufficiently large networks: in some executions, the gossip dies out quickly and hardly any node gets the message; in the remaining executions, a substantial fraction of the nodes gets the message. The fraction of executions in which most nodes get the message depends on the gossiping probability and the topology of the network. In the networks we have considered, using gossiping probability between 0.6 and 0.8 suffices to ensure that almost every node gets the message in almost every execution. For large networks, this simple gossiping protocol uses up to 35% fewer messages than flooding, with improved performance. Gossiping can also be combined with various optimizations of flooding to yield further benefits. Simulations show that adding gossiping to AODV results in significant performance improvement, even in networks as small as 150 nodes. Our results suggest that the improvement should be even more significant in larger networks.     

WRE‐OLSR,a new scheme for enhancing the lifetime within ad hoc and wireless sensor networks

Within ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, communications are accomplished in dynamic environments with a random movement of mobile devices. Thus, routing protocols over these networks are an important concern to offer efficient network scalability, manage topology information, and prolong the network lifetime. Optimized link state routing (OLSR) is one of those routing protocols implemented in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks. Because of its proactive technique, routes between two nodes are established in a very short time, but it can spend a lot of resources for selecting the multipoint relays (MPRs: nodes responsible for routing data) and exchanging topology control information. Thus, nodes playing for a long time a role of MPR within networks implementing such protocol can rapidly exhaust their batteries, which create route failures and affect the network lifetime. Our main approach relies on analyzing this concern by introducing a new criterion that implements a combination between the residual energy of a node and its reachability in order to determine the optimal number of MPRs and sustain the network lifetime. Simulations performed illustrate obviously that our approach is more significant compared with the basic heuristic used by original OLSR to compute the MPR set of a node.     

Regional Gossip Routing for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Many routing protocols have been proposed for wireless ad hoc networks, and most of them are based on some variants of flooding. Thus many routing messages are propagated through the network unnecessarily despite various optimizations. Gossip based routing method has been used and re-investigated to reduce the number of messages in both wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. However, the global gossiping still generates many unnecessary messages in the area that could be far away from the line between sender node and receiver node. We propose a regional gossip approach, where only the nodes within some region forward a message with some probability, to reduce the overhead of the route discovery in the network. We show how to set the forwarding probability based on the region and the network density both by theoretical analysis and by extensive simulations. Our simulations show that the number of messages generated using this approach is much less than the simple global gossiping method, which already saves many messages compared with global flooding. We expect that the improvement should be even more significant in larger networks.