Performance of new relay selection scheme for buffer-assisted multihop decode-and-forward networks

In this paper, a new relay selection scheme is proposed to reduce the end-to-end packet delivery delay for buffer-assisted multihop decode-and-forward cooperative networks. The proposed method selects a relay node having more packets in the associated buffer and relay's proximity to the destination node. Mathematical expressions for the outage probability and average packet delay in Rician fading are obtained by modeling the system as a Markov chain. The proposed relay selection scheme has less packet delay as compared to the max-link relay selection scheme with marginally higher outage probability. Thus, the proposed relay selection scheme is a good alternative to low latency wireless applications.     

Cooperative Strategies and Achievable Rate for Tree Networks With Optimal Spatial Reuse

In this paper, a low-complexity cooperative protocol that significantly increases the average throughput of multihop upstream transmissions for wireless tree networks is developed and analyzed. A system in which transmissions are assigned to nodes in a collision free, spatial time division fashion is considered. The suggested protocol exploits the broadcast nature of wireless networks where the communication channel is shared between multiple adjacent nodes within interference range. For any upstream end-to-end flow in the tree, each intermediate node receives information from both one-hop and two-hop neighbors and transmits only sufficient information such that the next upstream one-hop neighbor will be able to decode the packet. This approach can be viewed as the generalization of the classical three node relay channel for end-to-end flows in which each intermediate node becomes successively source, relay and destination. The achievable rate for any regular tree network is derived and an optimal schedule that realizes this rate in most cases is proposed. Our protocol is shown to dramatically outperform the conventional scheme where intermediate nodes simply forward the packets hop by hop. At high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), it yields approximately 66% throughput gain for practical scenarios.     

An energy-efficient MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11 in wireless ad hoc networks

Energy efficiency is a measure of the performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless multihop ad hoc networks. The IEEE 802.11 standard, currently used in wireless multihop ad hoc networks, wastes bandwidth capacity and energy resources because of many collisions. Therefore, controlling the contention window size at a given node will increase not only the operating life of the battery but also the overall system capacity. It is essential to develop effective backoff schemes for saving power in IEEE 802.11 wireless multihop ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient backoff scheme and evaluate its performance in an ad hoc network. Our contention window mechanism devised by us grants a node access to a channel on the basis of the node’s percentage of residual energy. We use both an analytical model and simulation experiments to evaluate the effective performance of our scheme in an ad hoc network. Our extensive ns-2-based simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme provides excellent performance in terms of energy goodput, end-to-end goodput, and packet delivery ratio, as well as the end-to-end delay.     

A Distributed End-to-End Reservation Protocol for IEEE 802.11-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper presents an end-to-end reservation protocol for quality-of-service (QoS) support in the medium access control layer of wireless multihop mesh networks. It reserves periodically repeating time slots for QoS-demanding applications, while retaining the distributed coordination function (DCF) for best effort applications. The key features of the new protocol, called "distributed end-to-end allocation of time slots for real-time traffic (DARE), are distributed setup, interference protection, and scheduling of real-time data packets, as well as the repair of broken reservations and the release of unused reservations. A simulation-based performance study compares the delay and throughput of DARE with those of DCF and the priority-based enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) used in IEEE 802.11e. In contrast to DCF and EDCA, DARE has a low, nonvarying delay and a constant throughput for each reserved flow     

CAPF: coded anycast packet forwarding for wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks, delay and reliability are two critical issues in the support of delay-sensitive applications. Due to sleep scheduling designed for energy efficiency, a node along an end-to-end path needs to wait for its next hop to wake up before it can transmit, which incurs extra delay. In addition, because of unreliable wireless communications, a node may not successfully receive the packet even when it is in active mode. In this paper, we propose a coded anycast packet forwarding (CAPF) scheme for both unicast and multicast communications such that the delay can be reduced and the reliability can be improved. We theoretically analyze the impact of nodes’ awake probability and the link loss probability on the end-to-end delay and the reliability. A tradeoff between the end-to-end delay and the reliability is also investigated. Simulation results demonstrate that CAPF provides a flexible mechanism to make good delay-reliability tradeoff and is effective to reduce the end-to-end delay and enhance the reliability.     

Adaptive Priority Sliding Admission Control and Scheduling Scheme for DCF and EDCA WLANs

In this paper an Adaptive Priority Sliding Admission Control and Scheduling (APSAS) scheme is proposed to provide QoS over the existing IEEE802.11 WLANs which operate on Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanisms. The roles of this scheme are generally two folds: (1) To control the number of delay-sensitive real time flows that can be admitted into the WLAN Basic Service Set network and (2) To adjust the priority of selected real time flows in order to accommodate more real time flows without violating the QoS requirement. Extensive simulation studies show that APSAS improves the total throughput, flow throughput ratio, packets end-to-end delay, and jitter of the real time applications when compared with conventional best effort and scheduling-enhanced DCF/EDCA. APSAS also offers near to unity average throughput ratio, lower mean VoIP end-to-end packet delay (<130 ms) and lower mean video packet jitter (<130 ms) over DCF and EDCA.     

A Link Adaptive Transport Protocol for Multimedia Streaming Applications in Multi Hop Wireless Networks

Transport layer performance in multi hop wireless networks has been greatly challenged by the intrinsic characteristics of these networks. In particular, the nature of congestion, which is mainly due to medium contention in multi hop wireless networks, challenges the performance of traditional transport protocols in such networks. In this paper, we first study the impact of medium contention on transport layer performance and then propose a new transport protocol for improving quality of service performance in multi hop wireless networks. Our proposed protocol, Link Adaptive Transport Protocol provides a systemic way of controlling transport layer offered load for multimedia streaming applications, based on the degree of medium contention information received from the network. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol provides an efficient scheme to improve quality of service performance metrics, such as end-to-end delay, jitter, packet loss rate, throughput smoothness and fairness for media streaming applications. In addition, our scheme requires few overhead and does not maintain any per-flow state table at intermediate nodes. This makes it less complex and more cost effective.     

Optimized Congestion Management Protocol for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

The application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in healthcare is dominant and fast growing. In healthcare WSN applications (HWSNs) such as medical emergencies, the network may encounter an unpredictable load which leads to congestion. Congestion problem which is common in any data network including WSN, leads to packet loss, increasing end-to-end delay and excessive energy consumption due to retransmission. In modern wireless biomedical sensor networks, increasing these two parameters for the packets that carry EKG signals may even result in the death of the patient. Furthermore, when congestion occurs, because of the packet loss, packet retransmission increases accordingly. The retransmission directly affects the lifetime of the nodes. In this paper, an Optimized Congestion management protocol is proposed for HWSNs when the patients are stationary. This protocol consists of two stages. In the first stage, a novel Active Queue Management (AQM) scheme is proposed to avoid congestion and provide quality of service (QoS). This scheme uses separate virtual queues on a single physical queue to store the input packets from each child node based on importance and priority of the source’s traffic. If the incoming packet is accepted, in the second stage, three mechanisms are used to control congestion. The proposed protocol detects congestion by a three-state machine and virtual queue status; it adjusts the child’s sending rate by an optimization function. We compare our proposed protocol with CCF, PCCP and backpressure algorithms using the OPNET simulator. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is more efficient than CCF, PCCP and backpressure algorithms in terms of packet loss, energy efficiency, end-to-end delay and fairness.     

A Multichannel Scheduler for High-Speed Wireless Backhaul Links with Packet Concatenation

Capacity has been an important issue for many wireless backhaul networks. Both the multihop nature and the large per packet channel access overhead can lead to its low channel efficiency. The problem may get even worse when there are many applications transmitting packets with small data payloads, e.g., Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Previously, the use of multiple parallel channels and employing packet concatenation were treated as separate solutions to these problems. However, there is no available work on the integrated design and performance analysis of a complete scheduler architecture combining these two schemes. In this paper, we propose a scheduler that concatenates small packets into large frames and sends them through multiple parallel channels with an intelligent channel selection algorithm between neighboring nodes. Besides the expected capacity improvements, we also derive delay bounds for this scheduler. Based on the delay bound formula, call admission control (CAC) of a broad range of scheduling algorithms can be obtained. We demonstrate the significant capacity and resequencing delay improvements of this novel design with a voice-data traffic mixing example, via both numerical and simulation results. It is shown that the proposed packet concatenation and channel selection algorithms greatly outperform the round-robin scheduler in a multihop scenario.     

DCMA: A Label Switching MAC for Efficient Packet Forwarding in Multihop Wireless Networks

This paper addresses the problem of efficient packet forwarding in a multihop, wireless "mesh" network. We present an efficient interface contained forwarding (ICF) architecture for a "wireless router," i.e., a forwarding node with a single wireless network interface card (NIC) in a multihop wireless network that allows a packet to be forwarded entirely within the NIC of the forwarding node without requiring per-packet intervention by the node's CPU. To effectively forward packets in a pipelined fashion without incurring the 802.11-related overheads of multiple independent channel accesses, we specify a slightly modified version of the 802.11 MAC, called data driven cut-through multiple access (DCMA) that uses multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-like labels in the control packets, in conjunction with a combined ACK/RTS packet, to reduce 802.11 channel access latencies. Our proposed technique can be used in combination with "frame bursting" as specified by the IEEE 802.11e standard to provide an end-to-end cut-through channel access. Using extensive simulations, we compare the performance of DCMA with 802.11 DCF MAC with respect to throughput and latency and suggest a suitable operating region to get maximum benefits using our mechanism as compared to 802.11     

Time-Driven Access and Forwarding for Industrial Wireless Multihop Networks

The deployment of wireless technologies in industrial networks is very promising mainly due to their inherent flexibility. However, current wireless solutions lack the capability to provide the deterministic, low delay service required by many industrial applications. Moreover, the high level of interference generated by industrial equipment limits the coverage that ensures acceptable performance. Multihop solutions, when combining frame forwarding with higher node density, have the potential to provide the needed coverage while keeping radio communication range short. However, in multihop solutions, the medium access time at each of the nodes traversed additively contributes to the end-to-end delay and the forwarding delay (i.e., the time required for packets to be processed, switched, and queued) at each node is to be added as well. This paper describes time-driven access and forwarding, a solution for guaranteeing deterministic delay, at both the access and forwarding level, in wireless multihop networks, analyzes its properties, and assesses its performance in industrial scenarios.     

Performance evaluation of packet aggregation scheme for VoIP service in wireless multi-hop network

In a wireless multi-hop network environment, energy consumption of mobile nodes is an important factor for the performance evaluation of network life-time. In Voice over IP (VoIP) service, the redundant data size of a VoIP packet such as TCP/IP headers is much larger than the voice data size of a VoIP packet. Such an inefficient structure of VoIP packet causes heavy energy waste in mobile nodes. In order to alleviate the effect of VoIP packet transmission on energy consumption, a packet aggregation algorithm that transmits one large VoIP packet by combining multiple small VoIP packets has been studied. However, when excessively many VoIP packets are combined, it may cause deterioration of the QoS of VoIP service, especially for end-to-end delay. In this paper, we analyze the effect of the packet aggregation algorithm on both VoIP service quality and the energy consumption of mobile nodes in a wireless multi-hop environment. We build the cost function that describes the degree of trade-off between the QoS of VoIP services and the energy consumption of a mobile node. By using this cost function, we get the optimum number of VoIP packets to be combined in the packet aggregation scheme under various wireless channel conditions. We expect this study to contribute to providing guidance on balancing the QoS of VoIP service and energy consumption of a mobile node when the packet aggregation algorithm is applied to VoIP service in a wireless multi-hop networks.     

Probabilistic Forwarding Decision Scheme for Reliable Geocasting in Wireless Sensor Networks

Geocasting is an important communication service in wireless sensor networks. Most of the existing geocasting protocols assume that sensor nodes and the area of interest have accurate location information. However, this assumption is unreasonable if localization systems or schemes cannot work well. This study proposes an efficient probabilistic forwarding decision scheme for reliable geocasting in virtual coordinate-based wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme uses directional code and hop distance to identify sensor node’s location. The sensor node determines a direction-based probability and a distance-based probability derived from its directional code and hop distance, respectively. The sensor node depends on the two probabilities to determine its ultimate forwarding probability. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme outperforms the pure direction-based forwarding scheme in packet delivery ratio though it occurs more packets. Results also show that the direction-based probability significantly dominates the geocasting performance.     

End-to-End Batch Transmission in a Multihop and Multirate Wireless Network: Latency, Reliability, and Throughput Analysis

This paper presents a novel Markov-based model for analyzing the end-to-end transmission of a batch of packets in a multihop wireless network using multirate transmission. The end-to-end reliability of this transmission (in terms of the number of packets delivered to the destination node) is controlled through different types of Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ)-based error control mechanisms implemented at each node. For a batch of packets, we derive complete statistics (i.e., probability mass function) for end-to-end latency and the number of packets successfully delivered to the destination node. Typical numerical results obtained from the model are validated by means of simulation. These results reveal the trade-off between end-to-end latency and end-to-end reliability, which would be an important issue in designing and engineering multihop wireless networks. Also, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed analytical model in predicting the latency and the reliability performances of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) in a multihop wireless scenario.     

Verifying Delivered QoS in Multihop Wireless Networks

The question that we consider here is the following: "How can a source verify the quality of service (QoS) experienced by its packet(s) at each hop to the destination in a multihop wireless network?" For example, if Bob needs to forward packets within some maximum delay of delta _B , how can the source verify that Bob in fact forwarded the packets within this bound? Answering this question will enable innovations in multihop wireless network deployments, where nodes may receive payment not only for forwarding packets but also for meeting some QoS guarantees. In this paper, we present protocols that enable verification of delivered QoS for individual packets, as well as verification of statistical QoS for groups of packets. The protocols are proven to be cheat proof. We also provide expressions for the minimum verifiable delay.     

Energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks using sleep mode TDMA scheduling

Power saving is a very critical issue in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. Many schemes can be found in the literature, which have significant contributions in energy conservation. However, these schemes do not concentrate on reducing the end-to-end packet delay while at the same time retaining the energy-saving capability. Since a long delay can be harmful for either large or small wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes a TDMA-based scheduling scheme that balances energy-saving and end-to-end delay. This balance is achieved by an appropriate scheduling of the wakeup intervals, to allow data packets to be delayed by only one sleep interval for the end-to-end transmission from the sensors to the gateway. The proposed scheme achieves the reduction of the end-to-end delay caused by the sleep mode operation while at the same time it maximizes the energy savings.     

Active caching: a transmission method to guarantee desired communication reliability in wireless sensor networks

Due to the high packet loss rate during multi-hop transmissions in wireless sensor networks, more reliable endto- end data transmission is desirable. Because wireless sensor network applications require various levels of communication reliability (CR), the end-to-end data transmission should satisfy the desired CR of the applications. In this letter, we propose a flexible loss recovery mechanism for sensor network applications with various CRs. The proposed scheme caches data packets at intermediate nodes over routing paths computed by CR to retransmit lost packets during multi-hop transmissions. Because the proposed scheme presents a tradeoff between end-to-end delays and memory requirements dependent on CR, it can be used flexibly in various sensor network applications.     

High-performance architectures for IP-based multihop 802.11 networks

The concept of a forwarding node, which receives packets from upstream nodes and then transmits these packets to downstream nodes, is a key element of any multihop network, wired or wireless. While high-speed IP router architectures have been extensively studied for wired networks, the concept of a "wireless IP router" has not been addressed so far. We examine the limitations of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in supporting a low-latency and high-throughput IP datapath comprising multiple wireless LAN hops. We first propose a wireless IP forwarding architecture that uses MPLS with modifications to 802.11 MAC to significantly improve packet forwarding efficiency. We then study further enhancements to 802.11 MAC that improve system throughput by allowing a larger number of concurrent packet transmissions in multihop 802.11-based IP networks. With 802.11 poised to be the dominant technology for wireless LANs, we believe a combined approach to MAC, packet forwarding, and transport layer protocols is needed to make high-performance multihop 802.11 networks practically viable.     

Urgency-based packet scheduling and routing algorithms for delay-sensitive data over MANETs

This paper proposes urgency-based packet scheduling and routing algorithms to effectively deliver delay-sensitive data over a multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks supporting IEEE 802.11 multi-rate service. First, packet urgency, node urgency, and route urgency are defined on the basis of the end-to-end delay requirement. Based on these urgency metrics and the estimated transmission delay of each packet by Kalman filter, the proposed packet scheduling algorithm determines the transmission order and drop policy to minimize the node urgency without unnecessary packet drop, and the proposed routing algorithm establishes a route to minimize the derivative of route urgency in order to maximize the number of packets delivered within the required end-to-end delay. Finally, experimental results are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed joint working algorithms.