A Dynamic Alternate Path QoS Enabled Routing Scheme in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of self-organized mobile nodes that are capable of communicating with each other without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. Routing algorithm has been a challenge task in the wireless ad hoc network for a long time due to the dynamic nature of network topology. A recent trend in ad hoc network routing is the reactive on-demand philosophy where routes are established only when required. The on-demand routing protocol for ad hoc network is appealing because of its low routing overhead and its effectiveness when the frequency of route re-establishment and the demand of route queries are not high. However, considering the increasing demand of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in many applications, the current on-demand routing protocols used for ad-hoc network should be adapted appropriately to effectively meet the stringent QoS requirements of specific multimedia traffic. We thus propose a routing protocol which tries its best to satisfy QoS requirements of specific multimedia traffic in the volatile environments of a MANET. The results of a series of simulations exhibit the practicability and feasibility of our approaches. This research was partially supported by National Science Council under grant NSC 93-2213-E-026-001     

Routing in wireless/mobile ad‐hoc networks via dynamic group construction

An ad-hoc network is temporarily formed by a group of mobile hosts communicating over wireless channels without any fixed network interaction and centralized administration. When a mobile host communicates with other mobile hosts in an ad-hoc network, the routes are established via the intermediate mobile hosts as forwarding nodes. Under such a network environment an adaptive approach for routing management will be proposed in this paper. In this approach, at first the network infrastructure is constructed by several communication groups, which are called routing groups. A routing group communicates with other routing groups via the boundary mobile hosts as forwarding nodes. In a routing group the mobile hosts are divided, by means of the dominating values, into two groups – one positive cluster and several non-positive clusters. The nodes in the positive cluster maintain the topology information of the routing group. Under such a construction environment, intra-group routing performs unicasting and gets multiple paths, while inter-group routing performs on group level by propagating the route requests to the boundary clusters, which are called bridge clusters. This routing scheme massively reduces the message complexity that is especially important for system performance under such a resource constraint environment. As far as the dynamic topology characteristics of ad-hoc networks are concerned, this approach also provides a more efficient infrastructure update. Finally, simulation results show that the routing via dynamic group construction outperforms the previous works in message complexity and infrastructure update efficiency. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

DynaMO: A Topology-Aware P2P Overlay Network for Dynamic,Mobile Ad-Hoc Environments

Due to the key differences between wired and ad-hoc wireless networks, traditional networking services and techniques are not always easily portable from an infrastructure based network to a wireless environment. One of the most prominent examples is the TCP transport protocol, which performs only poorly in wireless ad-hoc networks. The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks recently developed all target the Internet where a lot of performance issues can be neglected or can be completely ignored. In addition, assumptions made for infrastructure based networks cannot be made in an ad-hoc environment, such as a fixed set of nodes which are always available. This article presents a P2P network tailored towards mobile ad-hoc environments. It utilizes proximity information to efficiently generate an overlay structure which reflects the underlying physical network topology. This way, physical routing path lengths stretched by the overlay routing process are reduced. As a novelty it does not rely on a fixed set of nodes and adapts to changes in the physical network topology. A prominent property of the overlay construction process is that the communication overhead is reduced to a minimum. Additionally, the P2P network presented maintains an even Overlay ID distribution which is deliberately given up by some solutions previously developed for wired networks. The basis of this new overlay network is Pastry, a P2P substrate based on the concept of a distributed hash table. Two different bootstrap strategies were developed and analyzed, both explicitly designed to work in dynamic and mobile networks such as ad-hoc networks.     

Wireless Ad Hoc Multicast Routing with Mobility Prediction

An ad hoc wireless network is an infrastructureless network composed of mobile hosts. The primary concerns in ad hoc networks are bandwidth limitations and unpredictable topology changes. Thus, efficient utilization of routing packets and immediate recovery of route breaks are critical in routing and multicasting protocols. A multicast scheme, On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), has been recently proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a reactive (on-demand) protocol that delivers packets to destination(s) on a mesh topology using scoped flooding of data. We can apply a number of enhancements to improve the performance of ODMRP. In this paper, we propose a mobility prediction scheme to help select stable routes and to perform rerouting in anticipation of topology changes. We also introduce techniques to improve transmission reliability and eliminate route acquisition latency. The impact of our improvements is evaluated via simulation.     

Load balancing routing for single-layered satellite networks

The varying population density leads to imbalanced utilization rate of satellites. To ensure an intelligent engineering of traffic over satellite networks, a distributed routing scheme for single-layered satellite network, load balancing routing protocol based on mobile agent (LBRP-MA) is proposed. For LBRP-MA, mobile agents explore route by migrating autonomously. Upon arriving at destination, mobile agents migrate back. On each intermediate satellite, mobile agents evaluate path cost considering satellite geographical position as well as inter-satellite link (ISL) cost, and finally take ISL congestion index into account to update routing tables. Through simulations on the Courier-like constellation, the proposed approach is shown to achieve guaranteed end-to-end delay bound and decrease packet loss ratio with better throughput, which is especially suitable for data transferring in case of high traffic load. Moreover, results of the complexity analysis demonstrate that LBRP-MA can have low onboard signaling, storage and computation requirements. Furthermore, issues of LBRP-MA such as ISL congestion index and cost modification factor are discussed.     

Load-balancing routing in multichannel hybrid wireless networks with single network interface

A hybrid wireless network is an extension of an infrastructure network, where a mobile host may connect to an access point (AP) using multihop wireless routes, via other mobile hosts. The APs are configured to operate on one of multiple available channels. Mobile hosts and wireless routers can select its operating channel dynamically through channel switching. In this environment, a routing protocol that finds routes to balance load among channels while maintaining connectivity was proposed. The protocol works with nodes equipped with a single network interface, which distinguishes the work with other multichannel routing protocols that require multiple interfaces per node. The protocol discovers multiple routes to multiple APs, possibly operating on different channels. Based on a traffic load information, each node selects the "best" route to an AP and synchronizes its channel with the AP. With this behavior, the channel load is balanced, removing hot spots and improving channel utilization. The protocol assures every node has at least one route to an AP, where all intermediate nodes are operating on the same channel. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol successfully adapts to changing traffic conditions and improves performance over a single-channel protocol and a multichannel protocol with no load balancing.     

Hybrid mobile backbone network routing with flow control and distance awareness (MBNR-FC/DA)

The mobile backbone network (MBN) architecture has been introduced to synthesize robust, scalable and efficient mobile ad hoc wireless networks that support multimedia flows. Backbone capable nodes are dynamically elected to construct a mobile backbone (Bnet). In this article, we present a hybrid routing mechanism for such networks, identified as MBN routing with flow control and distance awareness (MBNR-FC/DA) scheme. Flows that travel a distance longer than a threshold level are routed across the Bnet. This induces a significant reduction in the route discovery control overhead, yielding a highly scalable operation. In turn, a limited span global route discovery process is invoked for routing shorter distance flows. Discovered global routes use effectively the capacity of non-backbone wireless links. Such an operation serves to upgrade the network’s throughput capacity level when the backbone network does not provide global topological covering. The hybrid routing protocol introduced and studied in this paper, also employs combined nodal congestion control and flow admission control schemes to guide admitted flows across areas that are less congested, and to avoid overloading the network. We present a centralized procedure as well as a distributed adaptive scheme for the calculation of the distance threshold level under varying traffic loading and backbone coverage conditions. We show our schemes to make efficient use of network-wide capacity resources by dynamically selecting proper distance threshold levels, yielding outstanding delay–throughput performance.     

移动代理技术在Ad Hoc无线网络中的应用研究

Ad Hoc无线网络是一组具有路由和转发功能的移动节点组成的一个多跳的临时性自治系统,是一种无中心的无线网络。现有的主动路由协议或者按需路由协议都不能很好地满足Ad Hoc网络的需要。介绍了Ad Hoc无线移动网络和移动代理技术。在分析了现有的2种路由协议后,提出了在按需路由协议中加入移动代理技术来增强Ad Hoc无线网络的性能。在这些结果的基础上,提出了移动代理通信协议。     

Bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees in large-scale ad-hoc networks

The purpose of this paper is to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Recent routing protocols and multicast protocols in large-scale MANETs adopt two-tier infrastructures to avoid the inefficiency of the flooding. Hosts with a maximal number of neighbors are often chosen as backbone hosts (BHs) to forward packets. Most likely, these BHs will be traffic concentrations/bottlenecks of the network. In addition, since host mobility is not taken into consideration in BH selection, these two-tier schemes will suffer from more lost packets if highly mobile hosts are selected as BHs. In this paper, a new multicast protocol is proposed for partitioning large-scale MANET into two-tier infrastructures. In the proposed two-tier multicast protocol, hosts with fewer hops and longer remaining connection time to the other hosts will be selected as BHs. The objective is not only to obtain short and stable multicast routes, but also to construct a stable two-tier infrastructure with fewer lost packets. Further, previous MANET quality-of-service (QoS) routing/multicasting protocols determined bandwidth-satisfied routes for QoS applications. Some are implemented as a probing scheme, but the scheme is inefficient due to high overhead and slow response. On the contrary, the others are implemented by taking advantage of routing and link information to reduce the inefficiency. However, the latter scheme suffers from two bandwidth-violation problems. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to avoid the two problems, and it is integrated with the proposed two-tier multicast protocol to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale MANETs. The proposed algorithm aims to achieve better network performance by minimizing the number of forwarders in a tree.