Cooperative and Opportunistic Channel Access for Vehicle to Roadside (V2R) Communications

This paper focuses on vehicle to roadside (V2R) communications in vehicular networks based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol. In vehicular networks, roadside units (RSUs) are typically spaced apart along the road and each vehicle can be connected to an RSU only when the vehicle is within its transmission range. Due to the high relative speed between a moving vehicle and a stationary RSU, the residence time of the vehicle within the coverage of each RSU is very short. Thus it is hard for the system to reach a steady state. With multi-hop forwarding, in which a vehicle may be connected to an RSU through relaying over other vehicles, the connection time of each V2R access may be extended. But this is at the expense of introducing wireless interference among vehicles, which may dramatically degrade the system performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new mechanism called Proxy-based Vehicle to RSU access (PVR) for V2R communications. This protocol is designed to exploit cooperative and opportunistic forwarding between any two distant RSUs and to emulate back-to-back transmissions within the coverage of an RSU. As a result, it can shorten the access delay by taking advantage of opportunistic forwarding and mitigate the interference problem during the short residence time within the coverage of an RSU. The simulation results show that PVR achieves excellent performance and outperforms all existing solutions for V2R communications in vehicular networks.     

Goodput and throughput comparison of single‐hop and multi‐hop routing for IEEE 802.11 DCF‐based wireless networks under hidden terminal existence

We investigate how multi‐hop routing affects the goodput and throughput performances of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function‐based wireless networks compared with direct transmission (single hopping), when medium access control dynamics such as carrier sensing, collisions, retransmissions, and exponential backoff are taken into account under hidden terminal presence. We propose a semi‐Markov chain‐based goodput and throughput model for IEEE 802.11‐based wireless networks, which works accurately with both multi‐hopping and single hopping for different network topologies and over a large range of traffic loads. Results show that, under light traffic, there is little benefit of parallel transmissions and both single‐hop and multi‐hop routing achieve the same end‐to‐end goodput. Under moderate traffic, concurrent transmissions are favorable as multi‐hopping improves the goodput up to 730% with respect to single hopping for dense networks. At heavy traffic, multi‐hopping becomes unstable because of increased packet collisions and network congestion, and single‐hopping achieves higher network layer goodput compared with multi‐hop routing. As for the link layer throughput is concerned, multi‐hopping increases throughput 75 times for large networks, whereas single hopping may become advantageous for small networks. The results point out that the end‐to‐end goodput can be improved by adaptively switching between single hopping and multi‐hopping according to the traffic load and topology. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A roadside unit‐based localization scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), designed to ensure the safety and comfort of passengers via the exchange of information amongst nearby vehicles or between the vehicles and Roadside Units (RSUs), have attracted particular attention. However, the success of many VANET applications depends on their ability to estimate the vehicle position with a high degree of precision, and thus, many vehicle localization schemes have been proposed. Many of these schemes are based on vehicle‐mounted Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. However, the GPS signals are easily disturbed or obstructed. Although this problem can be resolved by vehicle‐to‐vehicle communication schemes, such schemes are effective only in VANETs with a high traffic density. Accordingly, this paper presents a VANET localization scheme in which each vehicle estimates its location on the basis of beacon messages broadcast periodically by pairs of RSUs deployed on either side of the road. In addition, three enhancements to the proposed scheme are presented for the RSU deployment, RSU beacon collisions, and RSU failures. Overall, the ns‐2 simulation results show that the localization scheme achieves a lower localization error than existing solutions on the basis of vehicle‐to‐vehicle communications and is robust toward changes in the traffic density and the vehicle speed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reducing saturation and congestion in VANET networks: Alliance‐based approach and comparisons

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is composed mainly of fixed roadside entities (RSUs) and mobile entities (vehicles). In order to exchange information and data relating to the safety and comfort of road users, these different entities must establish communications between them. In these communications, one of the main problems is related to congestion and saturation of RSUs. In this paper, we first study the main protocols that involve RSUs in their strategy of routing by classifying them according to four levels. Furthermore, to deal with the problem of saturation of RSUs, we present a new approach of cooperation between the RSUs of a VANET in order to reduce its congestion and avoid as much as possible the saturation of these entities. This approach, called “D2A2RS” (defensive alliance–based approach for reducing RSUs saturation), is based on the concept of defensive alliances in graphs that ensures effective collaboration between RSUs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we conduct a comparative analysis by using both analytical models and simulations. The obtained comparison results have shown the efficiency and the performance of our approach compared with other concurrent approaches in the literature in terms of packet loss/success rate, end‐to‐end transmission delay, and network scalability.     

An efficient network‐coding based back‐pressure scheduling algorithm for wireless multi‐hop networks

Back‐pressure scheduling has been considered as a promising strategy for resource allocation in wireless multi‐hop networks. However, there still exist some problems preventing its wide deployment in practice. One of the problems is its poor end‐to‐end (E2E) delay performance. In this paper, we study how to effectively use inter‐flow network coding to improve E2E delay and also throughput performance of back‐pressure scheduling. For this purpose, we propose an efficient network coding based back‐pressure algorithm (NBP), and accordingly design detailed procedure regarding how to consider coding gain in back‐pressure based weight calculation and how to integrate it into next hop decision making in the NBP algorithm. We theoretically prove that NBP can stabilize the networks. Simulation results demonstrate that NBP can not only improve the delay performance of back‐pressure algorithm, but also achieve higher network throughput. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

HSG‐ad hoc network: A novel hierarchical star graph ad hoc network with self‐organization and routing discovery free

In ad hoc wireless networks, most data are delivered by multi‐hop routing (hop by hop). This approach may cause long delay and a high routing overhead regardless of which routing protocol is used. To mitigate this inherent characteristic, this work presents a novel ad hoc network structure that adopts dual‐card‐mode, self‐organization with specific IP naming and channel assignment to form a hierarchical star graph ad hoc network (HSG‐ad hoc). This network not only expedites data transmission but also eliminates the route discovery procedure during data transmission. Therefore, the overall network reliability and stability are significantly improved. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves substantial improvements over DSDV, AODV, and DSR in terms of average end‐to‐end delay, throughput, and packet delivery ratio. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A gradient‐based multiple‐path routing protocol for low duty‐cycled wireless sensor networks

Routing in a low duty‐cycled wireless sensor network (WSN) has attracted much attention recently because of the challenge that low duty‐cycled sleep scheduling brings to the design of efficient distributed routing protocols for such networks. In a low duty‐cycled WSN, a big problem is how to design an efficient distributed routing protocol, which uses only local network state information while achieving low end‐to‐end (E2E) packet delivery delay and also high packet delivery efficiency. In this paper, we study low duty‐cycled WSNs wherein sensor nodes adopt pseudorandom sleep scheduling for energy saving. The objective of this paper is to design an efficient distributed routing protocol with low overhead. For this purpose, we design a simple but efficient hop‐by‐hop routing protocol, which integrates the ideas of multipath routing and gradient‐based routing for improved routing performance. We conduct extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate the high performance of the proposed protocol in terms of E2E packet delivery latency and packet delivery efficiency as compared with existing protocols. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ROAMER: Roadside Units as message routers in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks, also known as VANETs, enable vehicles that are not necessarily within the same radio transmission range to communicate with each other. VANETs also allow vehicles to connect to Roadside Units (RSUs). The latter are connected to the Internet, forming a fixed infrastructure that offers them the capability of communicating with each other and with roaming vehicles. RSUs support cooperative and distributed applications in which vehicles and RSUs work together to coordinate actions and to share and process several types of information. RSUs have so far been used for different roles such as data disseminators, traffic directories, location servers, security managers, and service proxies. In this paper, we focus on routing; namely we exploit RSUs to route packets between any source and destination in the VANET. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use the RSU backbone to efficiently route packets to very far locations in VANETs by using geographic forwarding. We evaluate the RSU backbone routing performance via the ns2 simulation platform. We compare our scheme to existing solutions and prove the feasibility and efficiency of our scheme in terms of query delay, packet success delivery ratio, and total generated traffic.     

Time‐aware and energy‐efficient opportunistic routing with residual energy collection in wireless sensor networks

In 1‐dimensional queue wireless sensor networks, how to balance end‐to‐end latency and energy consumption is a challenging problem. However, traditional best path routing and existing opportunistic routing protocols do not address them well because relay hop counts are usually much more, and the link appears more unreliable compared with general mesh topology. In this work, we formulate these 2 problems as a multiobjective optimization problem. Specifically, we first classify network packets into types of time tolerant and time critical and introduce a residual energy collection mechanism of neighboring nodes for forwarder set selection. We then propose a time‐aware and energy‐efficient opportunistic routing protocol (TE‐OR) to optimize energy consumption and to reduce latency for time‐critical packets. We evaluate TE‐OR by different parameters and compare it with existing protocols. The performance results show that TE‐OR achieves a trade‐off between energy consumption and time delay and balances energy consumption among nodes while guaranteeing the latency of time‐critical packets is minimized.     

Autonomic self‐organization architecture for wireless sensor communications

Wireless sensor nodes may be spread over large areas and long distances, and require multi‐hop communications between nodes, making direct management numerous wireless sensor nodes inefficient. Hierarchical management can be adopted to control several nodes. Effectively controlling the top‐level nodes can decrease the costs of managing nodes and of the communication among them. The lower‐level nodes are controlled and organized with the higher‐level nodes. This study presents an algorithm for self‐organization mechanism of higher‐level nodes, contesting member nodes by multi‐hop to form hierarchical clusters, and applying the ‘20/80 rule’ to determine the ratio of headers to member nodes. Furthermore, the broadcast tree is constructed with the minimum number of hops. Simulation results indicate that the mechanism has a 6–22% lower cover loss than other approaches. The average delay of the minimum hop count approach is 0.22–1.57ms less than that of free hop count approach. The simulation also reveals the influence of 20/80 rule on cluster formation between sensor nodes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A delay‐centric parallel multi‐path routing protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc networks

In this paper, we develop a delay‐centric parallel multi‐path routing protocol for multi‐hop cognitive radio ad hoc networks. First, we analyze the end‐to‐end delay of multi‐path routing based on queueing theory and present a new dynamic traffic assignment scheme for multi‐path routing with the objective of minimizing end‐to‐end delay, considering both spectrum availability and link data rate. The problem is formulated as a convex problem and solved by a gradient‐based search method to obtain optimal traffic assignments. Furthermore, a heuristic decentralized traffic assignment scheme for multi‐path routing is presented. Then, based on the delay analysis and the 3D conflict graph that captures spectrum opportunity and interference among paths, we present a route discovery and selection scheme. Via extensive NS2‐based simulation, we show that the proposed protocol outperforms the benchmark protocols significantly and achieves the shortest end‐to‐end delay. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multi‐interface cognitive radio for enhanced routing in multi‐hop cellular networks

Multi‐hop cellular network (MCN) is a wireless communication architecture that combines the benefits of conventional single‐hop cellular networks and multi‐hop ad hoc relaying networks. The route selection in MCN depends on the availability of intermediate nodes and their neighborhood connectivity. Cognitive radio (CR) is an emerging communication paradigm that exploits the available radio frequencies opportunistically for the effective utilization of the radio frequency spectrum. The incorporation of CR and mobile ad hoc network routing protocols in MCN could potentially improve the spectrum utilization and the routing performance of MCN. This paper firstly presents the proposed model for the multi‐interface CR mobile node with transceiver synchronization and then investigates its opportunistic spectrum utilization and routing performance in MCN. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MPC: A RSUs deployment strategy for VANET

A Vehicle AdHoc Network is mainly composed of mobile vehicles and fixed Road Site Units (RSUs). The latter is usually very expensive to deploy and has a crucial role in maintaining the network connectivity. Therefore, the design of an efficient RSU deployment strategy that enables a high coverage ratio and a lower deployment cost has been of paramount importance. In this respect, we introduce in this paper a new spatiotemporal coverage strategy for nonsafety Vehicle AdHoc Network applications like driving assistance and business promotion, called Minimal Mobility Patterns Coverage (MPC). The main thrust of MPC is to (1) depict the mobility patterns of moving vehicles from their trace files and then (2) compute the adequate RSU locations in order to cover the extracted mobility patterns by the minimal possible number of RSUs. To this end, we firstly provide a new method to depict the mobility patterns of vehicles by mining the correlations between the kept track connections of vehicle trajectories versus crossed junctions. Secondly, we introduce a new way to compute the adequate RSU locations through the instantiation of the well‐known problem of extracting minimal transversals of a hypergraph. Experimental results show that our RSUs deployment strategy performs better than baseline strategies.     

Efficient multi‐hop wireless broadcast protocol in vehicular networks using automated threshold function design

Vehicular networking applications often use multi‐hop wireless broadcasting as a primary data dissemination mechanism. Therefore, protocols that efficiently and thoroughly propagate application data while adapting to a wide range of network density, vehicle distribution pattern, channel quality, and other conditions are critical for vehicular communications. Here, we design the Statistical Vehicular Broadcast (SVB) protocol to efficiently distribute data via multi‐hop broadcast in vehicular networks. First, we present an automated optimization technique for the design of threshold functions in statistical broadcasting methods. Next, we compare and analyze known statistical techniques, including different fundamental methods, assessment delay algorithms, and failsafe mechanisms. All combinations of these techniques are given threshold functions optimized using the proposed automated procedure then are evaluated in a wide range of simulations. High‐level statistical design principles and recommendations are established based on analysis of these results. Finally, we apply those principles to design SVB. It is evaluated in JiST/SWANS and is shown to achieve a high target reachability level while consuming less bandwidth than similar protocols across urban and highway vehicular networking scenarios.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multi‐hop communications in directional CSMA/CA over mmWave WPANs

In this paper, we consider the multi‐hop communications in contention period of medium access control protocol over millimeter‐wave band. A relaying devices selection policy and a grouping algorithm are proposed, and the directional carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance protocol in the immediate acknowledgement mode for IEEE 802.15.3c is considered under saturation environments. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of using directional antennas and relaying devices in contention period. A sensing region and an exclusive region are computed probabilistically and used in the grouping algorithm. Numerical results show that the narrower radiation beamwidth allows to use a channel more spatially, and the effect of using relaying devices increases as the beamwidth and number of devices increase. Those effects are presented in the throughput and average delay. The obtained results will be used as performance criterion for the multi‐hop communications in millimeter‐wave wireless personal area networks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross‐Layer Resource Allocation in Multi‐interface Multi‐channel Wireless Multi‐hop Networks

In this paper, an analytical framework is proposed for the optimization of network performance through joint congestion control, channel allocation, rate allocation, power control, scheduling, and routing with the consideration of fairness in multi‐channel wireless multi‐hop networks. More specifically, the framework models the network by a generalized network utility maximization (NUM) problem under an elastic link data rate and power constraints. Using the dual decomposition technique, the NUM problem is decomposed into four subproblems — flow control; next‐hop routing; rate allocation and scheduling; power control; and channel allocation — and finally solved by a low‐complexity distributed method. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed algorithm significantly improves the network throughput and energy efficiency compared with previous algorithms.     

A fast and reliable routing technique for wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), real time communications (e.g., Voice over IP (VoIP) and interactive video communications) may often be interrupted as packets are frequently lost or delayed excessively. This usually happens due to the unreliability of wireless links or buffer overflows along the routing paths. The mesh connectivity within the WMN enables the capability to enhance reliability and reduce delay for such applications by using multiple paths for routing their packets. The vital components in multi‐path routing for achieving this are the pre‐determined formation of paths and the technique that the paths are deployed for packet traversal. Therefore, we propose a novel multi‐path routing protocol by introducing a new multi‐path organization and a traffic assignment technique. The designed technique dubbed as FLASH (Fast and reLiAble meSH routing protocol) discovers one primary path between a pair of source and destination based on a new proposed metric, and thereafter selects mini‐paths, which connect pairs of intermediate nodes along the primary path. The primary path and mini‐paths are concurrently deployed, as multiple copies of packets are routed through. This technique compensates for possible outage at intermediate wireless nodes or their corresponding wireless links along the primary path. Routing along mini‐paths is performed in such a way that redundant copies do not cause an excessive congestion on the network. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated analytically and through extensive simulations under various load conditions. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed multi‐path organization in terms of reliability and satisfactory achievements of the protocol in enhancing delay and throughput compared to the existing routing protocols, especially for long distances and in congested conditions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RIALS: RSU/INS‐aided localization system for GPS‐challenged road segments

This paper introduces a new vehicle localization approach for global positioning system‐challenged road segments (e.g., tunnels), which takes advantage of roadside units (RSUs) and in‐vehicle inertial navigation system (INS). In the proposed approach, namely RSU/INS‐aided localization system (RIALS), vehicles only need one RSU in their transmission range for an accurate positioning. The beacons received from the RSU along with the information provided by the INS system are used for establishing and maintaining particular locus circles. After linearization, the system of locus circle equations is solved using the linear least square estimation technique, and the estimated vehicle's position is obtained. In the presence of speed variations and existing ranging and INS estimation errors, the proposed RIALS adaptively sets the sufficient number of required locus circles, aiming at keeping the localization error below a given threshold. We study the effects of ranging and INS estimation errors on localization accuracy of RIALS from analytical and simulation perspectives. Results of extensive simulations show that the localization error is more sensitive to the ranging error than the INS error. Moreover, the network traffic overhead of the proposed method is considerably lower than other competitive localization approaches. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An energy‐efficient localized topology control algorithm for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

Topology control plays an important role in the design of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks and has demonstrated its high capability in constructing networks with desirable characteristics such as sparser connectivity, lower transmission power, and smaller node degree. However, the enforcement of a topology control algorithm in a network may degrade the energy‐draining balancing capability of the network and thus reduce the network operational lifetime. For this reason, it is important to take into account energy efficiency in the design of a topology control algorithm in order to achieve prolonged network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a localized energy‐efficient topology control algorithm for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks with power control capability in network nodes. To achieve prolonged network lifetime, we introduce a concept called energy criticality avoidance and propose an energy criticality avoidance strategy in topology control and energy‐efficient routing. Through theoretical analysis and simulation results, we prove that the proposed topology control algorithm can maintain the global network connectivity with low complexity and can significantly prolong the lifetime of a multi‐hop wireless network as compared with existing topology control algorithms with little additional protocol overhead. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Autonomous and adaptive beaconing strategy for multi‐interfaced wireless mobile nodes

Ad hoc wireless communications rely on beaconing to manage and maintain several network operations and to share relevant network parameters among network nodes. Beacon frames are sent at the start of each beacon interval. The frequency of beaconing depends on whether beacon intervals are fixed size or may be adapted and regulated according to the perceived network and workload conditions. On the other hand, current mobile nodes usually embed several heterogeneous wireless interfaces that urge the design of an adaptive beaconing strategy. In this paper, we propose an autonomous and adaptive beaconing strategy for multi‐interfaced mobile wireless nodes that is capable of regulating the beacon interval size dynamically according to the perceived network conditions. The proposed strategy is based on a joint dynamic estimation of both the announcement traffic indication message (ATIM) window and the beyond‐ATIM window sizes for each beacon interval. Extensive simulations were conducted using OMNeT++ to ascertain the improvements achieved by autonomously regulating the entire beacon interval to take into account the network and workload conditions. Obtained results showed that the two proposed approaches improve significantly the efficiency of the network in terms of throughput, end‐to‐end delay, and power consumption. The proposed fixed beacon interval (fixed‐BI) approach stands as an enhanced version of the power‐saving multi‐channel MAC protocol (PSM‐MMAC). The proposed variable beacon interval (variable‐BI) approach, which regulates dynamically both of the ATIM and the beyond‐ATIM windows, outperforms both the fixed‐BI and the PSM‐MMAC. In particular, under nominal traffic loads, the end‐to‐end delay of the variable‐BI is much lower than those provided by the fixed‐BI and PSM‐MMAC. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.