Probabilistic quality-aware routing in cognitive radio networks under dynamically varying spectrum opportunities

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic routing metric that considers the peculiar characteristics of the operating environment of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). This metric captures the dynamic changes in channel availabilities due to the randomness of primary user’s activity and the rich channel diversity due to the fact that a CRN is expected to operate over highly separated frequency channels with different propagation characteristics. Our metric, Probability of Success (PoS), statistically quantifies the chances of a successful cognitive radio (CR) packet transmission over a given channel. Based on the PoS metric, we propose a joint probabilistic routing and channel assignment protocol for multi-hop CRNs that attempts at selecting the path with the maximum probability of success among all possible paths for a given CR source-destination pair. Selecting such a path results in minimizing the number of disruptions to CR packet transmissions, which consequently improves network throughput. Simulation results verify the significant throughput improvement achieved by our protocol compared to reference CRN routing protocols.     

认知无线电网络中QoS组播路由调度

在多跳认知无线电网络中,组播的信息通常要经由多个中间节点的转发才能到达最终的目的节点。现有的研究中已经有很多的组播路由协议,然而这些协议都是基于传统无线网络的,并不适合新型的认知无线电网络。本文解决的的问题是:在多跳无线网络中,给定一个具有QoS要求的组播请求,如何建立组播路由以及对路径节点进行传输调度,使得在满足QoS要求下整个传输过程的带宽消耗最小。本文提出了一个分布式的组播路由协议来解决该问题,该协议不仅实现了路由过程的建立,同时还完成了对节点传输过程的合理调度。实验结果证明本文的传输调度策略能有效地减少网络的带宽消耗,同时增加组播请求响应的成功率。     

Cognitive radio network security: A survey

Recent advancements in wireless communication are creating a spectrum shortage problem on a daily basis. Recently, Cognitive Radio (CR), a novel technology, has attempted to minimize this problem by dynamically using the free spectrum in wireless communications and mobile computing. Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) can be formed using cognitive radios by extending the radio link features to network layer functions. The objective of CRN architecture is to improve the whole network operation to fulfil the user's demands anytime and anywhere, through accessing CRNs in a more efficient way, rather than by just linking spectral efficiency. CRNs are more flexible and exposed to wireless networks compared with other traditional radio networks. Hence, there are many security threats to CRNs, more so than other traditional radio environments. The unique characteristics of CRNs make security more challenging. Several crucial issues have not yet been investigated in the area of security for CRNs. A typical public key infrastructure (PKI) scheme which achieves secure routing and other purposes in typical ad hoc networks is not enough to guarantee the security of CRNs under limited communication and computation resources. However, there has been increasing research attention on security threats caused specifically by CR techniques and special characteristics of CR in CRNs. Therefore, in this research, a survey of CRNs and their architectures and security issues has been carried out in a broad way in this paper.     

Full-duplex routing with low-complexity sequential-decision for throughput enhancement in dynamic access networks

Integrating the Full-Duplex (FD) communication technology in multi-hop Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) can significantly enhance routing decisions such that overall network performance is improved. Unfortunately, when employing the FD technology in multi-hop routing, the channel assignment becomes very challenging due to the possible simultaneous transmissions/reception. Hence, careful low-complexity channel assignment over the various hops along a path is needed to avoid hop-to-hop interference and enhance network performance. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity sequential-decision routing protocol, referred to as Sequential FD (SFD)-aware protocol. The SFD protocol identifies a set of possible routes between any source–destination communicating pair. For each discovered route, SFD successively assigns channels for each hop along the router such that the maximum route capacity is achieved. Then, SFD selects the routes with the highest capacity. Unlike most of existing FD-CRN channel assignment/routing protocols, which require optimization procedures with NP-hard time complexity with the number of channels and hops, the time-complexity of the proposed SFD protocol is polynomial. Compared to the optimal FD-aware routing (obtained using the brute-force search method) and maximum per-hop rate FD-unaware routing protocols, the simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed protocol and its superiority over the existing FD-unaware baseline routing protocol in terms of the end-to-end network throughput. The results also confirm that the SFD protocol provides solutions within 5% of the optimal ones.     

协调路由和资源预留机制的实时多播协议

流媒体应用程序必然涉及网络上的实时任务处理。在一般情况下每个数据流都有很多接收端,因此确保网络传输的时间限制的多播资源预留协议非常必要。提出了一个针对一对多,即一个发送端、多个接收端的实时多播协议,因为未涉及到多对多的情况,故称为简单实时多播协议。协议通过将路由机制和资源预留机制用一个通用接口协调起来,提供了一个更为灵活的连接建立方式,并同其它已存在的流媒体协议如RSVP、ST-II进行比较和分析。     

Buffer-assisted on-demand multicast for VOD applications

Multicast communications is widely used by streaming video applications to reduce both server load and network bandwidth. However, receivers in a multicast group must access the multicast stream simultaneously, and this restriction on synchronous access diminishes the benefit of multicast because users in a video-on-demand service usually issue requests asynchronously, i.e., at anytime. In this paper, we not only formulate this streaming problem but also propose a new multicast infrastructure, called buffer-assisted on-demand multicast, to allow receivers accessing a multicast stream asynchronously. A timing control mechanism is integrated on intermediate routing nodes (e.g., routers, proxies, or peer nodes in a peer-to-peer network) to branch time-variant multicast sub-streams to corresponding receivers. Besides, an optimal routing path and the corresponding buffer allocations for each request must be carefully determined to maximize the throughput of the multicast stream. We prove that the time complexity to solve this routing problem over general graph networks is NP-complete, and then propose a routing algorithm for overlay networks to minimize server load. Simulation results demonstrate that buffer-assisted on-demand multicast outperforms many popular streaming methods.     

Real-time video streaming over multipath in multi-hop wireless networks

Given the limited wireless link throughput, high loss rate, and varying end-to-end delay, supporting video applications in multi-hop wireless networks becomes a challenging task. Path diversity exploits multiple routes for each session simultaneously, which achieves higher aggregated bandwidth and potentially decreases delay and packet loss. Unfortunately, for TCP-based video streaming, naive load splitting often results in inaccurate estimation of round trip time (RTT) and packet reordering. As a result, it can suffer from significant instability or even throughput reduction, which is also validated by our analysis and simulation in multi-hop wireless networks. To make real-time TCP-based streaming viable over multi-hop wireless networks, we propose a novel cross-layer design with a smart traffic split scheme, namely, multiple path retransmission (MPR). MPR differentiates the original data packets and the retransmitted packets and works with a novel QoS-aware multi-path routing protocol, QAOMDV, to distribute them separately. MPR does not suffer from the RTT underestimation and extra packet reordering, which ensures stable throughput improvement over single-path routing. Through extensive simulations, we further demonstrate that, as compared with state-of-the-art multi-path protocols, our MPR with QAOMDV noticeably enhances the TCP streaming throughput and reduces bandwidth fluctuation, with no obvious impact to fairness.     

A multi-layer experimental study of multimedia and QoS communication in wireless mesh networks

A significant issue in Mesh networks is to support multimedia transmissions while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to mobile users. For real-time multimedia streaming, unstable throughput or insufficient bandwidth will incur unexpected delay or jitter, and it remains difficult to provide comprehensive service guarantees for a wireless mesh environment. In this paper, we target the problem of providing multimedia QoS in wireless mesh networks. We design and implement a campus test-bed for supporting multimedia traffic in mobile wireless mesh networks, and investigate in detail some possible improvements on a number of layers to enable multimedia transmission over wireless networks with QoS support. We first study a number of improvements of some existing routing protocols to support multimedia transmissions. Some new admission control and rate control mechanisms are studied and their performance gains are verified in our experiments. In our new cross-layer adaptive rate control (CLARC) mechanism, we adaptively change the video encoder’s output bit rate based on the available network bandwidth to improve the quality of the received video. We also design a mobile gateway protocol to connect the MANET to Internet and a wireless LAN management protocol to automatically manage WLAN to provide some QoS.     

基于自认证的认知无线电密钥交换协议研究

开放频谱策略使得认知无线电网络面临比传统网络更为复杂的安全威胁.频谱切换引发时延,降低认知无线电网络密钥交换协议的性能.为解决这一问题,提出一种适合认知无线电网络的密钥交换协议,在分簇基础上根据切换时延使用旅行商问题和组播路由树提高簇内和簇间路径选择效率.簇间和簇内使用基于自认证的多方密钥交换协议,不仅可以防止被动攻击,也可以阻止主动攻击,保证认证和密钥协商同步进行,其运行效率为O(2m),m为簇中节点数量.     

A robust method for soft IP handover

Multimedia streaming over wireless networks - often called mobile multimedia streaming lets users access music, movie, and news services at any time, regardless of location. Given that multimedia streaming is a key goal of third-generation and future wireless networks, vendors will soon deploy streaming clients in advanced mobile terminals. Current mobile terminals, however, fail to adequately support mobile multimedia communication because wireless networks have high packet-loss rates. To eliminate packet loss during handover, we use a packet path diversity scheme and an end-to-end bicasting mechanism that enables soft IP handover. To offset wireless errors, we use a forward error correction (FEC) scheme and embed it in the bicasting mechanism. Our bicasting method encodes the data stream and then splits it, providing more effective diversity than general bicasting, which sends the same data down both paths.' To support our method, we propose the mobile multimedia streaming protocol (MMSP), a new transport-layer protocol that supports multihoming and bicasting in combination with FEC.     

基于时间预测的多跳频谱切换算法研究

针对集中控制认知无线网络,在考虑频谱异构特性的同时,为保证频谱切换业务的服务质量,提出了一种多跳频谱切换算法。通过建立用户移动模型来预测分配信道的可使用时间;设计出路径中不同类型节点的路由处理方法;认知基站根据预测最短路径时间和路由请求包中的时间戳来选择最优路径。仿真结果表明,提出的多跳频谱切换算法能够大大降低切换阻塞概率,提高信道利用率;用户移动对信道可使用时间有着显著的影响。     

A quality based routing protocol for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks can provide low-cost solutions for extending the reach of wireless access points by using multi-hop routing over a set of stationary wireless routers. The routing protocol for these networks may need to address quality considerations to meet the requirements of the user. In this paper, we present a quality based routing protocol for wireless mesh networks that tries to maximize the probability of successful transmissions while minimizing the end-to-end delay. The proposed routing protocol uses reactive route discoveries to collect key parameters from candidate routes to estimate the probability of success and delay of data packets transmitted over them. To achieve accurate route quality assessments, a new route quality metric is proposed that uses performance models of data packet transmissions as opposed to estimating route quality from the transmission of control packets, which have different transmission characteristics. These models are developed after careful evaluations of multi-hop wireless transmissions and validated by computer simulations. Relevant parameters that can be used to assess the route quality metric using these models are explained. Extensive performance evaluations of the proposed quality based routing protocol are presented and its benefits in comparison to some other known routing protocols are discussed.     

An efficient joint channel assignment and QoS routing protocol for IEEE 802.11 multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

With the emerging of video, voice over IP (VoIP) and other real-time multimedia services, more and more people pay attention to quality of service (QoS) issues in terms of the bandwidth, delay and jitter, etc. As one effective way of broadband wireless access, it has become imperative for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to provide QoS guarantee. Existing works mostly modify QoS architecture dedicated for ad hoc or sensor networks, and focus on single radio and single channel case. Meanwhile, they study the QoS routing or MAC protocol from view of isolated layer. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer QoS-aware routing protocol on OLSR (CLQ-OLSR) to support real-time multimedia communication by efficiently exploiting multi-radio and multi-channel method. By constructing multi-layer virtual logical mapping over physical topology, we implement two sets of routing mechanisms, physical modified OLSR protocol (M-OLSR) and logical routing, to accommodate network traffic. The proposed CLQ-OLSR is based on a distributed bandwidth estimation scheme, implemented at each node for estimating the available bandwidth on each associated channel. By piggybacking the bandwidth information in HELLO and topology control (TC) messages, each node disseminates information of topology and available bandwidth to other nodes in the whole network in an efficient way. From topology and bandwidth information, the optimized path can be identified. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation to verify the performance of CLQ-OLSR in different scenarios on QualNet platform. The results demonstrate that our proposed CLQ-OLSR outperforms single radio OLSR, multi-radio OLSR and OLSR with differentiated services (DiffServ) in terms of network aggregate throughput, end-to-end packet delivery ratio, delay and delay jitter with reasonable message overheads and hardware costs. In particular, the network aggregate throughput for CLQ-OLSR can almost be improved by 300% compared with the single radio case.     

End-to-end protocols for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks: An evaluation study

Cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs) constitute a viable solution to solve the current problems of inefficiency in the spectrum allocation, and to deploy highly reconfigurable and self-organizing wireless networks. Cognitive radio (CR) devices are envisaged to utilize the spectrum in an opportunistic way by dynamically accessing different licensed portions of the spectrum. To this aim, most of the recent research has mainly focused on devising spectrum sensing and sharing algorithms at the link layer, so that CR devices can operate without interfering with the transmissions of other licensed users, also called primary users (PUs). However, it is also important to consider the impact of such schemes on the higher layers of the protocol stack, in order to provide efficient end-to-end data delivery. At present, routing and transport layer protocols constitute an important yet not deeply investigated area of research over CRAHNs. This paper provides three main contributions on the modeling and performance evaluation of end-to-end protocols (e.g. routing and transport layer protocols) for CRAHNs. First, we describe NS2-CRAHN, an extension of the NS-2 simulator, which is designed to support realistic simulation of CRAHNs. NS2-CRAHN contains an accurate yet flexible modeling of the activities of PUs and of the cognitive cycle implemented by each CR user. Second, we analyze the impact of CRAHNs characteristics over the route formation process, by considering different routing metrics and route discovery algorithms. Finally, we study TCP performance over CRAHNs, by considering the impact of three factors on different TCP variants: (i) spectrum sensing cycle, (ii) interference from PUs and (iii) channel heterogeneity. Simulation results highlight the differences of CRAHNs with traditional ad hoc networks and provide useful directions for the design of novel end-to-end protocols for CRAHNs.     

一种基于LEACH协议改进的簇间多跳路由协议

为了均衡无线传感器网络的能量消耗,延长网络的生存时间,在研究几种基于均匀分簇和非均匀分簇的路由协议基础上,提出一种基于LEACH协议改进的簇间多跳路由协议。该协议引入能量因子和距离因子修正了LEACH协议的阈值函数。在簇间通信过程,簇头节点与Sink节点之间采用多跳通信方式,簇头与簇头之间形成一条通向Sink节点的优化路径。实验结果表明,相比于LEACH协议和EEUC协议,本文提出的新协议能够有效的均衡网络的能量消耗,延长无线传感器网络的寿命。     

基于贪婪覆盖集的MANET自适应组播路由算法研究

MANET所具有的分布式、多跳、自组织、动态拓扑、时变信道、资源受限等特点,使得传统的有线网和有中心无线网络的路由算法和协议无法在MANET中直接应用,为此需要根据MANET的特点设计专门的组播路由算法和协议.结合基于Mesh和基于树形转发结构两类MANET组播路由的优点,提出一种基于贪婪覆盖集(Greedy Set Cover)的MANET组播路由算法ADMMR(Adaptive Distributed MANET Multicast Route based on Greedy Set Cover),节点可以动态地、分布式计算各自的转发列表,根据转发列表进行组播数据的转发,节省有限的带宽,减少信道冲突,降低网络负载,提高算法的总体性能.最后运用OPNET验证了该算法的有效性.     

An interference-aware fair scheduling for multicast in wireless mesh networks

Multicast is a fundamental routing service in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) due to its many potential applications such as video conferencing, online games, and webcast. Recently, researchers proposed using link-quality-based routing metrics for finding high-throughput paths for multicast routing. However, the performance of such link-quality-based multicast routing is still limited by severe unfairness. Two major artifacts that exist in WMNs are fading which leads to low quality links, and interference which leads to unfair channel allocation in the 802.11 MAC protocol. These artifacts cause the multicast application to behave unfairly with respect to the performance achieved by the multicast receivers.     

认知无线电网络信道交汇研究综述

认知无线电技术被认为是解决目前频谱资源利用率低下问题最有前景的技术,基于该技术,认知无线电网络采用动态频谱接入方式有效地提高了授权频段的利用率.然而,动态变化的信道可用性极大地增加了认知无线电网络组网的难度.信道交汇旨在为用户通信提供公共传输媒介,是实现无线网络组网的基础.介绍了认知无线电网络信道交汇的基本概念和特点,并阐述了信道交汇策略设计面临的挑战以及应考虑的性能指标.提出了信道交汇策略的分类标准和系统模型,根据该分类标准,详细剖析了当前信道交汇策略相关的研究工作.最后,讨论了认知无线电网络信道交汇研究的开放性问题,以期为未来的研究指出可能的方向和重点.     

Transmission of layered video streaming via multi-path on ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks without centralized infrastructure change their topology rapidly because of node mobility, making multimedia applications difficult to run across wireless networks. Moreover, video transmission over ad hoc networks causes frequent transmission loss of video packets owing to end-to-end transmission with a number of wireless links, and requires essential bandwidth and restricted delay to provide quality-guaranteed display. This paper presents an architecture supporting transmission of multiple video streams in ad hoc networks by establishing multiple routing paths to provide extra video coding and transport schemes. This study also proposes an on-demand multicast routing protocol to transport layered video streams. The multicast routing protocol transmits layered video streaming based on a weight criterion, which is derived according to the number of receivers, delay and expiration time of a route. A simulation is performed herein to indicate the viability and performance of the proposed approach. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed transport scheme is more effective than other video transport schemes with single or multiple paths.

A new wireless ad hoc multicast routing protocol

An ad hoc network is a multi-hop wireless network of mobile nodes without the intervention of fixed infrastructure. Limited bandwidth and mobility require that ad hoc routing protocols be robust, simple, and energy conserving. This paper proposes a new ad hoc multicast routing protocol called neighbor-supporting multicast protocol (NSMP). NSMP adopts a mesh structure to enhance resilience against mobility. And NSMP utilizes node locality to reduce the overhead of route maintenance. NSMP also attempts to improve route efficiency and reduce data transmissions. Our simulation results show that NSMP delivers packets efficiently while substantially reducing control overhead in various environments.