Ant‐inspired level‐based congestion control for wireless mesh networks

The ever increasing presence of services over wireless networks utilizing large bandwidth necessitates the constant quest for developing efficient and dependable services, capable of providing support to a wide and variety of applications. Wireless mesh networks can provide such reliable and scalable solutions addressing the requirements of the services utilizing large bandwidth. The current focus is on the interesting and challenging issue of channel access for different services with assured bandwidth guarantees. The problem of bandwidth, constantly encountered by the wireless mesh networks, is studied in this paper with due thrust on the issues pertaining to congestion control mechanisms. A novel ant colony‐based approach called ant‐inspired level‐based congestion control (AILCC) is developed in order to effectively manage the issues of bandwidth. The versatility of the AILCC includes its capacity for service differentiation in addressing a range of requests, such as applications of real‐time and nonreal‐time. The primary focus of AILCC is on providing an efficient congestion control mechanism that can meet numerous bandwidth demands of various applications. The performance of AILCC in terms of the ratio of packet delivery and end‐to‐end delay is evaluated through relevant simulations. The results obtained demonstrate greater levels of performance of AILCC over the other methods in existence. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Network infrastructure extension using 802.1D‐based wireless mesh networks

Ubiquitous Internet access is becoming a major requirement for end‐users due to the increasing number of services and applications supported over the Internet. Extending the coverage of current Wi‐Fi infrastructures installed in companies, universities and cities, has been considered a solution to help in fulfilling this requirement, namely when it comes to wireless and nomadic Internet access. This paper describes and analyses a new and simple solution, called Wi‐Fi network Infrastructure eXtension (WiFIX), aimed at extending current Wi‐Fi infrastructures. WiFIX is based on standard IEEE 802.1D bridges and a single‐message protocol that is able to self‐organize the network, and it only requires software changes in IEEE 802.11 access points (APs); no changes to IEEE 802.11 stations are needed. Overhead analysis and experimental results show both the higher efficiency of the solution compared to the IEEE 802.11s draft standard and its good performance as far as data throughput, delay and packet loss are concerned. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

VoIP traffic in wireless mesh networks: a MOS‐based routing scheme

Support of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services in wireless mesh networks requires implementation of efficient policies to support low‐delay data delivery. Multipath routing is typically supported in wireless mesh networks at the network level to provide high fault tolerance and load balancing because links in the proximity of the wireless mesh gateways can be very stressed and overloaded, thus causing scarce performance. As a consequence of using multipath solutions, lower delay and higher throughput can be supported also when a given path is broken because of mobility or bad channel conditions, and alternative routes are available. This can be a relevant improvement especially when assuming that real‐time traffic, such as VoIP, travels into the network. In this paper, we address the problem of Quality of Service (QoS) support in wireless mesh networks and propose a multipath routing strategy that exploits the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) metric to select the most suitable paths for supporting VoIP applications and performing adaptive load balancing among the available paths to equalize network traffic. Performance results assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach when compared with other existing methodologies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A topology preserving cluster‐based channel assignment for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) with multiple radios and multiple channels are expected to resolve the capacity limitation problem of simpler wireless networks. However, optimal WMN channel assignment (CA) is NP complete, and it requires an optimal mapping of available channels to interfaces mounted over mesh routers. Acceptable solutions to CA must minimize network interference and maximize available network throughput. In this paper, we propose a CA solution called as cluster‐based channel assignment (CBCA). CBCA aims at minimizing co‐channel interference yet retaining topology through non‐default CA. Topology preservation is important because it avoids network partitions and is compatible with single‐interface routers in the network. A ‘non‐default’ CA solution is desired because it uses interfaces over different channels and reduces medium contention among neighbors. To the best of our knowledge, CBCA is a unique cluster‐based CA algorithm that addresses topology preservation using a non‐default channel approach. The main advantage of CBCA is it runs in a distributed manner by allowing cluster heads to perform CA independently. CBCA runs in three stages, where first the WMN nodes are partitioned into clusters. The second stage performs binding of interfaces to neighbors and third stage performs CA. The proposed algorithm improves over previous work because it retains network topology and minimizes network interference, which in turn improves available network throughput. Further, when compared with two other CBCA algorithms, CBCA provides better performance in terms of improved network interference, throughput, delay, and packet delivery ratios when tested upon network topologies with various network densities and traffic loads. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

认知无线Mesh网络中基于马氏决策模型的MAC协议

为解决认知无线Mesh网络中专用控制信道较难获得的问题,提出一种基于POMDP的机会式频谱接入MAC协议,在不需要中心控制器和专用控制信道的协调下,实现动态频谱感知和接入。仿真结果表明,基于POMDP的接入策略能够有效提高网络频谱利用率和吞吐量,性能最优,而基于贪心算法的接入策略,在降低计算复杂度的同时,获得了较好的性能,实用性较强。     

基于传输路径质量的无线mesh网络可靠多播

提出了一种可靠多播网(RM)模型,探讨了无线链路和节点可靠性对多播路径选择的影响。首先,建立了无线链路的相关性和多播路径的可靠性模型,并提出了多播传输的可靠性判据;同时,结合首树算法和多路径树算法提出了构造可靠多播网的算法。可靠多播网具有并行的多播路径,通过在多播源节点和目的节点之间选择多播链路和节点构成了可靠的多播路径,提供了多播路径的"负荷分担"和"热备份"功能,从而支持了多播业务可靠性。     

A taxonomy and evaluation for developing 802.11‐based wireless mesh network testbeds

The definition of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has been used in the literature to connote and epitomize the ideal, ubiquitous, pervasive, and autonomic networking technology. An increasing interest has been emerging on the development of 802.11‐based WMN testbeds to test the new ideas and approaches more realistically as opposed to relying solely on simulations. Although the developed testbeds have provided several insights to researchers for furthering the technology, there are still several issues that need to be addressed, particularly, with the approval of new standards, such as IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.11n, and IEEE 802.16, and upcoming protocols, such as IEEE 802.11ac, 802.11ad, 802.11ah, and 802.11af TV White Space efforts. In this paper, our goal is to provide a taxonomy and insightful guidelines for the creation of 802.11‐based WMN testbeds as well as to identify several features that future WMN testbeds should possess. Utilizing these features, we evaluate the existing WMN testbeds. Finally, in addition to the existing WMN testbed experiments conducted at several layers of the protocol stack, we provide a list of open future research issues that can benefit from experiments on WMN testbeds. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fair coding for inter‐session network coding in wireless mesh networks

Because of the broadcast and overhearing capability of wireless networks, network coding can greatly improve throughput in wireless networks. However, our investigation of existing inter‐session network coding protocols found that the short‐term unfairness that existed in 802.11‐based medium access control (MAC) protocols actually decreases the coding opportunity, which in turn compromises the throughput gain of network coding. To alleviate the negative impact of this unfairness, we propose a coding‐aware cross‐layer heuristic approach to optimize the coordination of network coding and MAC layer protocol, named FairCoding, which can significantly increase coding opportunities for inter‐session network coding through a fair short‐term traffic allocation for different coding flows. Experiment evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism can bring more coding opportunities and improve the total throughput of wireless mesh networks by up to 20%, compared with the coding mechanism, without considering the negative impact of the short‐term unfairness. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

分布式队列服务算法在无线网状网包调度中的应用

根据无线网状网的包调度特点,结合已有的差分队列服务算法和分布式贝尔曼-福特算 法,将有线网络中的差分队列服务算法改进为分布式队列服务算法（DQS）,使之实用于无 线网状网中多任务条件下实现系统的吞吐量最大化。仿真实验证明了DQS算法能有效地避免 传统多径传输中的按“类”或 “流”来进行调度的缺陷,有效地减少了数据包的端到端 延时和缓冲区需求,尤其是DQS算法的实际平均吞吐量性能有了很大的提高。     

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.     

Multi‐cost routing for energy and capacity constrained wireless mesh networks

We propose a class of novel energy‐efficient multi‐cost routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks, and evaluate their performance. In multi‐cost routing, a vector of cost parameters is assigned to each network link, from which the cost vectors of candidate paths are calculated using appropriate operators. In the end these parameters are combined in various optimization functions, corresponding to different routing algorithms, for selecting the optimal path. We evaluate the performance of the proposed energy‐aware multi‐cost routing algorithms under two models. In the network evacuation model, the network starts with a number of packets that have to be transmitted and an amount of energy per node, and the objective is to serve the packets in the smallest number of steps, or serve as many packets as possible before the energy is depleted. In the dynamic one‐to‐one communication model, new data packets are generated continuously and nodes are capable of recharging their energy periodically, over an infinite time horizon, and we are interested in the maximum achievable steady‐state throughput, the packet delay, and the energy consumption. Our results show that energy‐aware multi‐cost routing increases the lifetime of the network and achieves better overall network performance than other approaches. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Schemes for mobility management of wireless ATM networks

The growing fields of wireless networks and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) are merging to form wireless ATM networks. This paper addresses dynamic bandwidth allocation, connection admission procedures, routing, and location management strategies in wireless ATM. More precisely, we investigate the issue of extending the private Network to Network Interface, PNNI, and protocols to support mobility. PNNI‐based hierarchical routing, hand‐off, location management and routing schemes are proposed to integrate wireless capabilities into ATM networks. These schemes provide fast and efficient hand‐off connection processing mechanism and a reduction in the connection disruption time during a connection hand‐off session. They also provide a predictable resource requirement of the mobile system during its connection. During a connection hand‐off, misrouted cells can be re‐routed to their destinations. This substantially reduces the overhead due to end‐to‐end re‐transmissions invoked at higher layers. An analytical model is developed to illustrate the hand‐off algorithm. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Handoff performance in wireless DS‐CDMA networks

This paper analyses the performance of DS‐CDMA networks in the presence of call handoffs. We show that a handoff may violate the SINR requirements for other users, and thus cause an outage in the target cell. We propose to use the probability of such events as a possible metric for quality of service in networks with multiple traffic types, and derive the corresponding QoS parameters. A two‐level admission policy is defined: in tier 1 policy, the network capacity is calculated on the basis of the bound on outage probability. However, this policy does not suffice to prevent outage events upon handoffs for various traffic types, and henceforth, we propose an extension that reserves extra bandwidth for handoff calls, thus ensuring that handoff calls will not violate the outage probability bound. The overhead imposed by the extension is negligible, as the complete two‐tier admission control algorithm is executed only when a call is admitted into the network. Once admitted, calls can freely execute handoffs using the reserved bandwidth. The modified second‐tier bandwidth reservation policy is adaptive with respect to the traffic intensity and user's mobility and we show that it can provide satisfactory call (flow) quality during its lifetime. Analytical results for the QoS have been verified by the simulations. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

多接口多信道无线Mesh网中一种基于信号干扰监测的路由度量机制

多接口多信道无线Mesh网中,提出了一种基于信号干扰监测的路由度量机制(ISB)。现有的路由度量机制如WCETT、iAWARE等均存在各自的不足。通过对iAWARE深入分析,发现其并不能正确地反映背景噪声这一重要因素。为此改进了该度量机制,使其更加正确地反映背景噪声,并且具有了等分性,即可以在路由协议中使用如Bellman-Ford或Dijkstra路径计算方法。理论分析和网络仿真表明,新度量机制下的网络性能如网络吞吐量和端到端延迟均优于HopCount、ETT、WCETT和iAWARE。     

Cross‐layer scheduling for multi‐users in cognitive multi‐radio mesh networks

A wireless mesh network has been popularly researched as a wireless backbone for Internet access. However, the deployment of wireless mesh networks in unlicensed bands of urban areas is challenging because of interference from external users such as residential access points. We have proposed Urban‐X, which is a first attempt towards multi‐radio cognitive mesh networks in industrial, scientific, and medical bands. Urban‐X first controls network topology with a distributed channel assignment to avoid interference in large timescale. In such a topology, we develop a new link‐layer transmission‐scheduling algorithm together with source rate control as a small‐timescale approach, which exploits receiver diversity when receivers of multi‐flows can have different channel conditions because of varying interference. For this purpose, mesh nodes probe the channel condition of received mesh nodes using group Request to Send and group Clear to Send. In this study, we establish a mathematical Urban‐X model in a cross‐layer architecture, adopting a well‐known network utility maximization framework. We demonstrate the feasibility of our idea using a simulation on the model. Simulation results show improved network throughput from exploiting receiver diversity and distributed channel assignment under varying external user interference. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross‐layer optimization for CDMA/TDD wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes a new cross‐layer optimization algorithm for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). CDMA/TDD (code division multiple access/time division duplex) is utilized and a couple of TDD timeslot scheduling schemes are proposed for the mesh network backbone. Cross‐layer optimization involves simultaneous consideration of the signal to interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) at the physical layer, traffic load estimation and allocation at medium access control (MAC) layer, and routing decision at the network layer. Adaptive antennas are utilized by the wireless mesh routers to take advantage of directional beamforming. The optimization formulation is subject to routing constraints and can be solved by general nonlinear optimization techniques. Comparisons are made with respect to the classic shortest‐path routing algorithm in the network layer. The results reveal that the average end‐to‐end successful packet rate (SPR) can be significantly improved by the cross‐layer approach. The corresponding optimized routing decisions are able to reduce the traffic congestion. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A weighted interference estimation scheme for interface‐switching wireless mesh networks

The co‐channel interference problem in wireless mesh networks (WMN) is extremely serious due to the heavy aggregated traffic loads and limited available channels. It is preferable for mesh routers to dynamically switch channels according to the accurate estimation of co‐channel interference level in the neighborhood. Most developed interference estimation schemes, however, do not consider the impact of interface switching. Furthermore, the interference in wireless networks has been extensively considered as an all‐or‐nothing event. In this paper, we develop a weighted interference estimation scheme (WIES) for interface‐switching WMN. WIES takes a new version of multi‐interface conflict graph that considers the impacts of frequent interface switching as the interference relationship estimation scheme. Besides, WIES uses a weight to estimate the interference level between links. The weight utilizes two empirical functions to denote the impacts of the relative distance and characteristics of traffic loads in WMN. Extensive NS2 simulations show that WIES achieves significant performance improvements, especially when the interference level of the network is high. We also validate that the interference level of networks is affected by several system parameters such as the number of available channels and the ratio between interference range and transmission range. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A cross‐layer optimization for maximum‐revenue‐based multicast in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks

Given a video/audio streaming system installed on a multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network, we are interested in a problem concerning about how to construct a delay‐constrained multicast tree to support concurrent interference‐free transmissions so that the number of serviced mesh clients is maximized. In this paper, we propose a heuristic approach called cross‐layer and load‐oriented (CLLO) algorithm for the problem. On the basis of the cross‐layer design paradigm, our CLLO algorithm can consider application demands, multicast routing, and channel assignment jointly during the formation of a channel‐allocated multicast tree. The experimental results show that the proposed CLLO outperforms the layered approaches in terms of the number of serviced mesh clients and throughputs. This superiority is due to information from higher layers can be used to guide routing selection and channel allocation at the same time. As a result, the CLLO algorithm can explore more solution spaces than the traditional layered approaches. In addition to that, we also propose a channel adjusting procedure to enhance the quality of channel‐allocated multicast trees. According to our simulations, it is proved to be an effective method for improving the performance of the proposed CLLO algorithm. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A non‐biased trust model for wireless mesh networks

Trust models that rely on recommendation trusts are vulnerable to badmouthing and ballot‐stuffing attacks. To cope with these attacks, existing trust models use different trust aggregation techniques to process the recommendation trusts and combine them with the direct trust values to form a combined trust value. However, these trust models are biased as recommendation trusts that deviate too much from one's own opinion are discarded. In this paper, we propose a non‐biased trust model that considers every recommendation trusts available regardless they are good or bad. Our trust model is based on a combination of 2 techniques: the dissimilarity test and the Dempster‐Shafer Theory. The dissimilarity test determines the amount of conflict between 2 trust records, whereas the Dempster‐Shafer Theory assigns belief functions based on the results of the dissimilarity test. Numerical results show that our trust model is robust against reputation‐based attacks when compared to trust aggregation techniques such as the linear opinion pooling, subjective logic model, entropy‐based probability model, and regression analysis. In addition, our model has been extensively tested using network simulator NS‐3 in an Infrastructure‐based wireless mesh networks and a Hybrid‐based wireless mesh networks to demonstrate that it can mitigate blackhole and grayhole attacks.