Contention aware mobility prediction routing for intermittently connected mobile networks

This paper introduces a novel multi-copy routing protocol, called predict and forward (PF), for delay tolerant networks, which aims to explore the possibility of using mobile nodes as message carriers for end-to-end delivery of the messages. With PF, the message forwarding decision is made by manipulating the probability distribution of future inter-contact and contact durations based on the network status, including wireless link condition and nodal buffer availability. In particular, PF is based on the observations that the node mobility behavior is semi-deterministic and could be predicted once there is sufficient mobility history information. We implemented the proposed protocol and compared it with a number of existing encounter-based routing approaches in terms of delivery delay, delivery ratio, and the number of transmissions required for message delivery. The simulation results show that PF outperforms all the counterpart multi-copy encounter-based routing protocols considered in the study.     

Power and delay optimisation in multi-hop wireless networks

In this paper, we study the optimisation problem of transmission power and delay in a multi-hop wireless network consisting of multiple nodes. The goal is to determine the optimal policy of transmission rates at various buffer and channel states in order to minimise the power consumption and the queueing delay of the whole network. With the assumptions of interference-free links and independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channel states, we formulate this problem using a semi-open Jackson network model for data transmission and a Markov model for channel states transition. We derive a difference equation of the system performance under any two different policies. The necessary and sufficient condition of optimal policy is obtained. We also prove that the system performance is monotonic with respect to (w.r.t.) the transmission rate and the optimal transmission rate can be either maximal or minimal. That is, the ‘bang-bang’ control is an optimal control. This optimality structure greatly reduces the problem complexity. Furthermore, we develop an iterative algorithm to find the optimal solution. Finally, we conduct the simulation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We hope our work can shed some insights on solving this complicated optimisation problem.     

Transport control protocol in optical burst switched networks: issues, solutions, and challenges

Since its advent in 1981, TCP has been subject to a tremendous amount of research effort and enhancements for achieving better performance over various network environments and application scenarios. Due to the transmission characteristics of optical burst switched networks, such as random burst dropping, retro-blocking (i.e., bursts proceeding or delayed from their actual reservation time slot), burstification delay, and burst signaling delay, TCP could be significantly affected if no corresponding countermeasure and enhancement are developed. In this review article we provide a comprehensive survey on reported studies for TCP enhancements over OBS networks in order to mitigate the numerous side effects due to the buffer- less characteristic of burst transmission. Furthermore, we closely analyze TCP behavior over OBS networks with various burst transmission characteristics while highlighting the open challenges that have not yet been extensively tackled or solved.     

Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Root Exudation: How Important is Heterogeneity in Allelopathic Interactions?

Understanding allelopathy has been hindered by the lack of methods available to monitor the dynamics of allelochemicals in the soil. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microtubing (silicone tubing microextraction, or STME) to construct sampling devices to monitor the release of lipophilic allelochemicals from plant roots. The objective of this study was to use such sampling devices to intensively monitor thiophene fluxes beneath marigolds over several weeks to gain insight into the magnitude of temporal and spatial heterogeneity in these fluxes. Marigolds were grown in rhizoboxes (20.5 x 20.5 x 3.0 cm) with 16 individual STME samplers per box. Thiophene sampling and HPLC analysis began 45 days after planting. At the end of the study, roots around each sampler were analyzed by HPLC. Results confirmed the tremendous spatial and temporal heterogeneity in thiophene production seen in our previous studies. STME probes show that thiophene concentrations generally increase over time; however, these effects were sampling-port specific. When sampling ports were monitored at 12 h intervals, fluxes at each port ranged from 0 to 2,510 ng day^?1. Fluxes measured over daylight hr averaged 29 % higher than those measured overnight. Fluxes were less than 1 % on average of the total thiophene content of surrounding roots. While the importance of such heterogeneity, or “patchiness”, in the root zone has been recognized for soil nutrients, the potential importance in allelopathic interactions has seldom been considered. The reasons for this variability are unclear, but are being investigated. Our results demonstrate that STME can be used as a tool to provide a more finely-resolved picture of allelochemical dynamics in the root zone than has previously been available.     

FAST TCP over optical burst switched networks: Modeling and stability analysis

FAST TCP is important for promoting data-intensive applications since it can cleverly react to both packet loss and delay for detecting network congestion. This paper provides a continuous time model and extensive stability analysis of FAST TCP congestion-control mechanism in bufferless Optical Burst Switched Networks (OBS). The paper first shows that random burst contentions are essential to stabilize the network, but cause throughput degradation in FAST TCP flows when a burst with all the packets from a single round is dropped. Second, it shows that FAST TCP is vulnerable to burst delay and fails to detect network congestion due to the little variation of round-trip time, thus unstable. Finally it shows that introducing extra delays by implementing burst retransmission stabilizes FAST TCP over OBS. The paper proves that FAST TCP is not stable over barebone OBS. However, it is locally, exponentially, and asymptotically stable over OBS with burst retransmission.     

iFrag: interference-aware frame fragmentation scheme for wireless sensor networks

Reliable data transmission is a fundamental challenge in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. In current implementations, a single bit error requires retransmitting the entire frame. This incurs extra processing overhead and power consumption, especially for large frames. Frame fragmentation into small blocks with individual error detection codes can reduce the unnecessary retransmission of the correctly received blocks. The optimal block size, however, varies based on the wireless channel conditions. In this paper, we propose an interference-aware frame fragmentation scheme called iFrag. iFrag dynamically adjusts the number of blocks inside a frame based on current channel conditions, and effectively addresses all challenges associated with such dynamic partitioning. Through analytical and experimental results, we show that iFrag achieves up to \(3\times\) improvement in goodput when the channel is noisy, while reducing the delay by 12 % compared to other static fragmentation approaches. On average, it shows a 13 % gain in goodput across all channel conditions used in our experiments. Our testbed results also show that iFrag lowers the energy consumed per useful bit by 60 %, as improved data transmission reliability reduces the number of frame retransmissions which increases the motes energy efficiency.