Distributed semi-synchronous channel coordination for multi-channel wireless networks

In multi-channel wireless networks, multi-channel diversity can increase the number of concurrent transmissions and thus improve the throughput performance as data transmission on a wireless channel does not interfere with transmissions on the other non-overlapping channels. However, multi-channel coordination may cause severe performance degradation due to hidden terminals, missing receivers, or broadcast deafness problems if the channel usage information is not properly shared among the neighboring nodes. In this paper, we devise a semi-synchronous multi-channel coordination protocol that enables wireless nodes to: (i) efficiently exchange channel and coordination information, and (ii) reduce the overhead of channel switchings. In the proposed protocol, a rendezvous interval is set up in a distributed manner depending on the traffic rate and pattern, and each node independently switches its channel when it can complete its transmissions and then returns to the control channel within the rendezvous interval. This approach makes all nodes return to the control channel at almost the same time without incurring a severe synchronization overhead. Through subsequent analyses and simulation studies, we show that the proposed protocol effectively reduces the number of channel switchings, thereby achieving higher throughput in various multi-channel networking environments.     

On a joint temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment and routing scheme in resource-constrained wireless mesh networks

Use of multiple orthogonal channels can significantly improve network throughput of multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In these WMNs where multiple channels are available, channel assignment is done either in a centralized manner, which unfortunately shows a poor scalability with respect to the increase of network size, or in a distributed manner, where at least one channel has to be dedicated for exchanging necessary control messages or time synchronization has to be utilized for managing the duration of data packet transmission, causing excessive system overhead and waste of bandwidth resource. In this paper, we first formulate multi-channel assignment as a NP-hard optimization problem. Then a distributed, heuristic temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment and routing scheme is proposed, assuming every wireless node in the network is equipped with a single-radio interface. Here the gateway node is set to use all the channels sequentially in a round-robin fashion. This temporal scheme ensures all the nodes that need to directly communicate with the gateway node shall have a fair access to it. For those non-gateway nodes, a spatial scheme where channels are assigned based on their neighbors’ channel usage is adopted to exploit parallel communications and avoid channel interference among nodes. Furthermore, since the routing factors, including channel usage of neighbor nodes, node hop count, node memory size, and node communication history, are all considered along with the channel assignment, network performance, measured by packet delivery latency, channel usage ratio, and memory usage ratio, tends to be considerably enhanced. The simulation results have confirmed that, compared with a couple of well-known multi-channel assignment schemes, such as LCM [21] and ROMA [15], the proposed scheme shows substantial improvement in network throughput with a very modest collision level. In addition, the proposed scheme is highly scalable as the algorithm complexity is only linearly dependent on the total number of channels that are available in the network and the number of neighbors that a network node directly connects to.     

Intelligent wireless mesh path selection algorithm using fuzzy decision making

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are expected to be widely deployed due to their ability to provide ubiquity, convenience, cost-efficiency, and simplicity for both service providers and end-users. Recently, the IEEE 802.11s standard introduces the hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP) which is inspired by a combination of on-demand and tree-based pro-active routing algorithms. In this paper, we argue that the proposed unimetric path selection algorithm in the standard is not reliable. We introduce and examine a novel multimetric wireless mesh path selection algorithm using fuzzy decision making under realistic wireless channel conditions. The proposed path selection algorithm is designed to improve the performance of both re-active and pro-active routing protocols of HWMP for not only single-channel but also multi-channel WMNs. The reported results show the superior performance of the proposed path selection algorithm in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio without increasing overhead significantly. Although some fuzzy-based routing algorithms have been defined in literature recently, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one to introduce and examine the use of fuzzy logic in the path selection of single- and multi-channel wireless local area network-based WMNs under realistic wireless channel conditions.     

An efficient channel assignment algorithm for multicast wireless mesh networks

Multicast can enhance the performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) effectively, which has attracted great attentions in recent years. However, multicast communication in WMNs requires efficient channel assignment strategy to reduce the total network interference and maximize the network throughput. In this paper, the concept of local multicast is proposed to measure interference and solve hidden channel problem in multicast communication. Basing on the concept, we propose a channel assignment algorithm considering the interference of local multicast and forwarding weight of each node (LMFW). The algorithm fully considers partially overlapped channels and orthogonal channels to improve the network performance. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can reduce interference and improve network capacity of WMNs.     

Unified routing protocol based on passive bandwidth measurement in heterogeneous WMNs

The past few years have witnessed a surge of wireless mesh networks (WMNs)‐based applications and heterogeneous WMNs are taking advantage of multiple radio interfaces to improve network performance. Although many routing protocols have been proposed for heterogeneous WMNs, most of them mainly relied on hierarchical or cluster techniques, which result in high routing overhead and performance degradation due to low utilization of wireless links. This is because only gateway nodes are aware of all the network resources. In contrast, a unified routing protocol (e.g., optimal link state routing (OLSR)), which treats the nodes and links equally, can avoid the performance bottleneck incurred by gateway nodes. However, OLSR has to pay the price for unification, that is, OLSR introduces a great amount of routing overhead for broadcasting routing message on every interface. In this paper, we propose unified routing protocol (URP), which is based on passive bandwidth measurement for heterogeneous WMNs. Firstly, we use the available bandwidth as a metric of the unification and propose a low‐cost passive available bandwidth estimation method to calculate expected transmission time that can capture the dynamics of wireless link more accurately. Secondly, based on the estimated available bandwidth, we propose a multipoint relays selection algorithm to achieve higher transmission ability and to help accelerate the routing message diffusion. Finally, instead of broadcasting routing message on all channels, nodes running URP transmit routing message on a set of selected high bandwidth channels. Results from extensive simulations show that URP helps improve the network throughput and to reduce the routing overhead compared with OLSR and hierarchical routing. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Load-aware channel hopping protocol design for mobile ad hoc networks

Using multiple channels in wireless networks improves spatial reuse and reduces collision probability and thus enhances network throughput. Designing a multi-channel MAC protocol is challenging because multi-channel-specific issues such as channel assignment, the multi-channel hidden terminal problem, and the missing receiver problem, must be solved. Most existing multi-channel MAC protocols suffer from either higher hardware cost or poor throughput. Some channel hopping multi-channel protocols achieve pretty good performance in certain situations but fail to adjust their channel hopping mechanisms according to varied traffic loads. In this paper, we propose a load-aware channel hopping MAC protocol (LACH) that solves all the multi-channel-specific problems mentioned above.LACH enables nodes to dynamically adjust their schedules based on their traffic loads. In addition to load awareness, LACH has several other attractive features: (1) Each node is equipped with a single half-duplex transceiver. (2) Each node’s initial hopping sequence is generated by its ID. Knowing the neighbor nodes’ IDs, a node can calculate its neighbors’ initial channel hopping sequences without control packet exchanges. (3) Nodes can be evenly distributed among available channels. Through performance analysis, simulations, and real system implementation, we verify that LACH is a promising protocol suitable for a network with time-varied traffic loads.     

Survey of multi-channel MAC protocols for IEEE 802.11-based wireless Mesh networks

This paper reviews multi-channel media access control (MAC) protocols based on IEEE 802.11 in wireless Mesh networks (WMNs). Several key issues in multi-channel IEEE 802.1l-based WMNs are introduced and typical solutions proposed in recent years are classified and discussed in detail. The experiments are performed by network simulator version 2 (NS2) to evaluate four representative algorithms compared with traditional IEEE 802.11. Simulation results indicate that using multiple channels can substantially improve the performance of WMNs in single-hop scenario and each node equipped with multiple interfaces can substantially improve the performance of WMNs in multi-hop scenario.     

A Cooperative Channel Assignment protocol for multi-channel multi-rate wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are considered as one of the outstanding technologies that provide cost-effective broadband Internet accesses to users. The off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11 PHY and MAC specifications support both multi-channel and multi-rate capabilities. However, designing an efficient channel assignment protocol that exploits both available channels and data rates is a critical issue to overcome the network performance degradation. In multi-rate wireless networks, high-rate links may severely suffer from throughput degradation due to the presence of low-rate links. This problem is often referred to as performance anomaly. In this paper, we design a Cooperative Channel Assignment (CoCA) protocol to consider the performance anomaly problem in multi-channel multi-rate WMNs. Based on the proposed family architecture, CoCA exploits the Estimated Delivery Time (EDT) metric and an efficient balancing algorithm. Using the EDT metric, CoCA performs channel assignments to form Multi-channel Multi-hop Paths (MMPs) so that CoCA separates high-rate links from low-rate links over different channels and increases the channel diversity. In addition, CoCA considers the performance anomaly problem and throughput fairness during channel assignments by utilizing the balancing algorithm. We evaluated the performance of CoCA through extensive simulations and found that CoCA outperforms existing well-known channel assignment protocols for WMNs.     

R-Code: Network coding-based reliable broadcast in wireless mesh networks

Broadcast is an important communication primitive in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Applications like network-wide software updates require reliable broadcast to ensure that every node in the network receives the information completely and correctly. With underlying unreliable wireless links, a key challenge in implementing reliable broadcast in WMNs is to achieve 100% information reception rate at every node with high communication efficiency and low latency. Recently, network coding has emerged as a promising coding scheme in terms of communication efficiency especially for one to many communication patterns. In this paper, we put forward R-Code, a network coding-based reliable broadcast protocol. We introduce a guardian–ward relationship between neighboring nodes that effectively distributes the responsibility of reliable information delivery – from the global responsibility of the source to the localized responsibilities of guardians to their corresponding wards. We use a link quality-based minimum spanning tree as a backbone to guide the selection of guardians adaptively and the transmission of coded packets accordingly. Opportunistic overhearing is also utilized to improve the performance of the protocol. Extensive simulation results show that R-Code achieves 100% packet delivery ratio (PDR), while enjoying significantly less transmission overhead and shorter broadcast latency, compared with a state-of-the-art reliable broadcast protocol, AdapCode.     

EAOMDV-MIMC: A Multipath Routing Protocol for Multi-Interface Multi-Channel Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Multipath routing has been proposed to improve performance of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). However, due to: (1) nodes lacking of network interface and (2) route coupling, using multiple paths concurrently in conventional single channel MANETs rarely exhibit performance gain. To improve performance, an ad-hoc routing protocol (and its extension) that utilizes multiple homogeneous network interface is proposed in this paper. Unlike other related multi-channel routing protocols, channels are not assigned. Instead, nodes are allowed to make use of all available channels they are tuned to. In the base protocol, nodes estimate channel conditions by monitoring their network interface queues and distribute data packets to different channels and next-hops according to their conditions. In the extended protocol, estimated channel condition at a node is further propagated to neighboring nodes by piggybacking channel condition information in data packets. With overhearing, other nodes can retrieve this information to make better next-hop selections. Extensive simulation studies show that our protocol outperforms other related multi-channel routing protocols.     

Path diversified multi-QoS optimization in multi-channel wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have become a promising solution for quick and low-cost spreading of Internet accesses and other network services. Given the mesh topology, multiple paths are often available between node pairs, which thus naturally endorse path-diversified transmission. Unfortunately, like in wired networks, discovering completely disjoint paths in a WMN remains an intractable problem. It indeed becomes more challenging given the interferences across wireless channels in a WMN, not to mention that applications may demand heterogeneous QoS optimizations across different paths. The availability of multiple channels in advanced WMNs however sheds new lights into this problem. In this paper, we show that, as long as the best channels with different QoS metrics are not overlapped between neighboring node pairs, complete disjoint paths with heterogeneous QoS targets are available in a multi-channel WMN. We present efficient solutions to discover such paths, particularly for bandwidth- and delay-optimization. We also develop novel algorithms for accurately estimating path bandwidth and delay in the multi-channel environment. These lead to the design of a practical protocol that extends the classical Ad hoc On-demand Multi-path Distance Vector (AOMDV). Through extensive simulations, we show that our protocol yields significant improvement over state-of-the-art multi-path protocols in terms of both end-to-end throughput and delay.     

On-demand routing and channel assignment in multi-channel mobile ad hoc networks

The capacity of mobile ad hoc networks is constrained by the intra-flow interference introduced by adjacent nodes on the same path, and inter-flow interference generated by nodes from neighboring paths. By assigning orthogonal channels to neighboring nodes, one can minimize both types of interferences and allow concurrent transmissions within the neighborhood, thus improving the throughput and delay performance of the ad hoc network. In this paper, we present three novel distributed channel assignment protocols for multi-channel mobile ad hoc networks. The proposed protocols combine channel assignment with distributed on-demand routing, and only assign channels to active nodes. They are shown to require fewer channels and exhibit lower communication, computation, and storage complexity, compared with existing approaches. Through simulation studies, we show that the proposed protocols can effectively increase throughput and reduce delay, as compared to several existing schemes, thus providing an effective solution to the low capacity problem in multi-hop wireless networks.     

A reliable overlay video transport protocol for multicast agents in wireless mesh networks

A new video transport protocol for multicast agents in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is proposed in this paper. The proposed protocol enables a significant reduction in the transmission overhead, while providing reliable communication for its use in multicast applications. This proposed reliable protocol provides a practical approach for an overlay peer‐to‐peer multicast facility supported within the application layer. This obviates the need to give upgraded routers capable of handling multicast broadcasting or modify the existing protocol stack. The protocol tolerates partial losses in multimedia transmissions, while supporting control of the delay sensitivity of such transmissions in WMNs. The key issue in this protocol is the ability to detect packet loss, anticipate retransmission requests, and use the anticipated retransmission requests to transmit the lost packets prior to requests from other receiving agents. The proposed protocol allows for the receiver to determine if retransmission of lost packets is required, ensuring the greatest flexibility needed for a reliable multicast protocol. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Multi-Objective Optimization Approach for Joint Channel Assignment and Multicast Routing in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Multicast routing is an effective mechanism for delivering data to a group of receivers. Due to intrinsic property of air medium in wireless mesh networks (WMN), interference is an important issue in determining the data rate for multicast services. Interference reduction is handled by assigning multiple orthogonal channels to multiple radios in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs. Channel assignment is known to be a NP-complete problem. Most prior methods have solved multicast routing and channel assignment problems sequentially and have not considered the interplay between these two problems. Focusing on this issue, we address joint channel assignment and routing problem for multicast applications. In this paper, a novel technique based on a multi-objective genetic algorithm is proposed to build a delay constrained minimum cost multicast tree with minimum interference. We have examined the proposed algorithm on different network configurations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method finds better trees in terms of cost, delay, and interference compared to prior methods.     

A ring-based multicast routing topology with QoS support in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networking (WMN) is an emerging technology for future broadband wireless access. The proliferation of the mobile computing devices that are equipped with cameras and ad hoc communication mode creates the possibility of exchanging real-time data between mobile users in wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we argue for a ring-based multicast routing topology with support from infrastructure nodes for group communications in WMNs. We study the performance of multicast communication over a ring routing topology when 802.11 with RTS/CTS scheme is used at the MAC layer to enable reliable multicast services in WMNs. We propose an algorithm to enhance the IP multicast routing on the ring topology. We show that when mesh routers on a ring topology support group communications by employing our proposed algorithms, a significant performance enhancement is realized. We analytically compute the end-to-end delay on a ring multicast routing topology. Our results show that the end-to-end delay is reduced about 33 %, and the capacity of multicast network (i.e., maximum group size that the ring can serve with QoS guarantees) is increased about 50 % as compared to conventional schemes. We also use our analytical results to develop heuristic algorithms for constructing an efficient ring-based multicast routing topology with QoS guarantees. The proposed algorithms take into account all possible traffic interference when constructing the multicast ring topology. Thus, the constructed ring topology provides QoS guarantees for the multicast traffic and minimizes the cost of group communications in WMNs.     

MC-LMAC: A multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In traditional wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, energy efficiency may be considered to be the most important concern whereas utilizing bandwidth and maximizing throughput are of secondary importance. However, recent applications, such as structural health monitoring, require high amounts of data to be collected at a faster rate. We present a multi-channel MAC protocol, MC-LMAC, designed with the objective of maximizing the throughput of WSNs by coordinating transmissions over multiple frequency channels. MC-LMAC takes advantage of interference and contention-free parallel transmissions on different channels. It is based on scheduled access which eases the coordination of nodes, dynamically switching their interfaces between channels and makes the protocol operate effectively with no collisions during peak traffic. Time is slotted and each node is assigned the control over a time slot to transmit on a particular channel. We analyze the performance of MC-LMAC with extensive simulations in Glomosim. MC-LMAC exhibits significant bandwidth utilization and high throughput while ensuring an energy-efficient operation. Moreover, MC-LMAC outperforms the contention-based multi-channel MMSN protocol, a cluster-based channel assignment method, and the single-channel CSMA in terms of data delivery ratio and throughput for high data rate, moderate-size networks of 100 nodes at different densities.     

Multi‐channel power‐controlled directional MAC for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged recently as a technology for providing high‐speed last mile connectivity in next‐generation wireless networks. Several MAC protocols that exploit multiple channels and directional antennas have been proposed in the literature to increase the performance of WMNs. However, while these techniques can improve the wireless medium utilization by reducing radio interference and the impact of the exposed nodes problem, they can also exacerbate the hidden nodes problem. Therefore, efficient MAC protocols need to be carefully designed to fully exploit the features offered by multiple channels and directional antennas. In this paper we propose a novel Multi‐Channel Power‐Controlled Directional MAC protocol (MPCD‐MAC) for nodes equipped with multiple network interfaces and directional antennas. MPCD‐MAC uses the standard RTS‐CTS‐DATA‐ACK exchange procedure. The novel difference is the transmission of the RTS and CTS packets in all directions on a separate control channel, while the DATA and ACK packets are transmitted only directionally on an available data channel at the minimum required power, taking into account the interference generated on already active connections. This solution spreads the information on wireless medium reservation (RTS/CTS) to the largest set of neighbors, while data transfers take place directionally on separate channels to increase spatial reuse. Furthermore, power control is used to limit the interference produced over active nodes. We measure the performance of MPCD‐MAC by simulation of several realistic network scenarios, and we compare it with other approaches proposed in the literature. The results show that our scheme increases considerably both the total traffic accepted by the network and the fairness among competing connections. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

无线Ad Hoc网络中基于业务感知的多信道MAC协议(英文)

Existing multi-channel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been demonstrated to significantly increase wireless network performance compared to single channel MAC protocols. Traditionally, the channelization structure in IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks is pre-configured, and the entire available spectrum is divided into subchannels and equal channel widths. In contrast, this paper presents a Traffic-Aware Channelization MAC (TAC-MAC) protocol for wireless ad hoc networks, where each node is equipped with a single half duplex transceiver. TAC-MAC works in a distributed, fine-grai-ned manner, which dynamically divides variable-width subchannels and allocates subchannel width based on the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique according to the traffic demands of nodes. Simulations show that the TAC-MAC can significantly improve network throughput and reduce packet delay compared with both fixed-width multi-channel MAC and single channel 802.11 protocols, which illustrates a new paradigm for high-efficient multi-channel MAC design in wireless ad hoc networks.     

Rate-Adaptive MAC Protocol for Wireless Multicast Over OFDMA-Based MANETs

Unlike in unicast transmissions, a feedback channel has not been implemented for multicast transmission over Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), due to the increase in the overhead with increasing group member size. As a result, rate-adaptation for wireless multicast has not been considered either. In this paper, a novel rate-adaptive Medium Access Control protocol is proposed to allow dynamic rate-adaptation for wireless multicast transmission over MANETs by utilizing the orthogonality of the subcarriers in an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing system. In the proposed rate-adaptation method, each member station is assigned a unique subcarrier and by using this subcarrier, its preferred data rate in the current channel condition is reported to the multicast source. Due to their orthogonality, the feedbacked packets simultaneously transmitted by the group members can be distinguished at the source. Therefore, the source chooses the most appropriate data rate for all member stations. By using this method, the data rate for wireless multicast is able to be adaptively changed, so that the overall network performance is improved.     

VMcMAC: Voice Call Support over Wireless Multi-Channel MAC Protocol

This paper presents a new scheme to support voice calls over a wireless multi-channel MAC protocol (VMcMAC). We increase the voice capacity of wireless networks by reducing protocol overhead and interference between voice traffic and data traffic. Voice calls are allocated to specific reserved channels in a distributed TDMA fashion. Each voice node visits the voice channel with a fixed frequency and then transmits a voice frame without sending control messages. Simulation results show a significant improvement in the voice capacity of wireless ad-hoc networks