Extending P2PMesh: topology‐aware schemes for efficient peer‐to‐peer data sharing in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology that provides low‐cost broadband access to the Internet for fixed and mobile wireless end users. An orthogonal evolution in computer networking has been the rise of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) applications such as P2P data sharing. It is of interest to enable effective P2P data sharing in this type of networks. Conventional P2P data sharing systems are not cognizant of the underlying network topology and therefore suffer from inefficiency. We argue for dual‐layer mesh network architecture with support from wireless mesh routers for P2P applications. The main contribution of this paper is P2PMesh: a topology‐aware system that provides combined architecture and efficient schemes for enabling efficient P2P data sharing in WMNs. The P2PMesh architecture utilizes three schemes: (i) an efficient content lookup that mitigates traffic load imbalance at mesh routers; (ii) an efficient establishment of download paths; and (iii) a data transfer protocol for multi‐hop wireless networks with limited capacity. We note here that the path establishment and data transfer schemes are specific to P2P traffic and that other traffic would use routes determined by the default routing protocol in the WMN. Simulation results suggest that P2PMesh has the potential to improve the performance of P2P applications in a wireless multi‐hop setting; specifically, we focused on data sharing, but other P2P applications can also be supported by this approach. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Novel Section‐Based Joint Network Coding and Scheduling Scheme in WMNs: JNCS

Guaranteeing quality of service over a multihop wireless network is difficult because end‐to‐end (ETE) delay is accumulated at each hop in a multihop flow. Recently, research has been conducted on network coding (NC) schemes as an alternative mechanism to significantly increase the utilization of valuable resources in multihop wireless networks. This paper proposes a new section‐based joint NC and scheduling scheme that can reduce ETE delay and enhance resource efficiency in a multihop wireless network. Next, this paper derives the average ETE delay of the proposed scheme and simulates a TDMA network where the proposed scheme is deployed. Finally, this paper compares the performance of the proposed scheme with that of the conventional sequential scheduling scheme. From the performance analysis and simulation results, the proposed scheme gives more delay‐ and energy‐efficient slot assignments even if the NC operation is applied, resulting in a use of fewer network resources and a reduction in ETE delay.     

iTCP: an intelligent TCP with neural network based end-to-end congestion control for ad-hoc multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Maintaining the performance of reliable transport protocols, such as transmission control protocol (TCP), over wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a challenging problem due to the unique characteristics of data transmission over WMNs. The unique characteristics include multi-hop communication over lossy and non-deterministic wireless mediums, data transmission in the absence of a base station, similar traffic patterns over neighboring mesh nodes, etc. One of the reasons for the poor performance of conventional TCP variants over WMNs is that the congestion control mechanisms in conventional TCP variants do not explicitly account for these unique characteristics. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence based congestion control technique for reliable data transfer over WMNs. The synergy with artificial intelligence is established by exploiting a carefully designed neural network (NN) in the congestion control mechanism. We analyze the proposed NN based congestion control technique in detail and incorporate it into TCP to create a new variant that we name as intelligent TCP or iTCP. We evaluate the performance of iTCP using both ns-2 simulations and real testbed experiments. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed congestion control technique exhibits a significant improvement in total network throughput and average energy consumption per transmitted bit compared to the congestion control techniques used in other TCP variants.     

A Survey of Mobility Management in Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

Mobility management is vital for realizing large-scale wireless mesh networks to provide cost-effective broadband Internet access. Although a considerable amount of research on mobility management for cellular, Mobile IP, and mobile ad hoc networks has been proposed, mobility management for IP-based hybrid WMNs, including the mobility support from both the network and link layers, remains largely unexplored. Traditional mobility management mechanisms, when applied to hybrid WMNs, may cause significant performance degradation because of the overlooking of key features of WMNs. Challenges arising from multihop wireless communications require the design of new mobility management techniques in WMNs. In this article, mobility management in IP-based hybrid WMNs is investigated. The motivation for mobility management in WMNs is explained, and the existing work is surveyed. To address the new challenges, various open design issues also are presented.     

无线网状网技术与应用

无线网状网(WMNs)由网状路由器节点和客户机节点组成,其中的网状路由器节点组成了无线网状网的网络骨干,其移动性很小。他们一起为无线网状网和其他常规无线网络的客户机节点提供网络的无线接入。WMNs技术结合了中心式控制的蜂窝网与分布式控制的无线自组织网的优点,可有效克服这两种技术的缺陷并显著提高无线网络的性能,已经成为下一代无线通信网络的研究热点之一。WMNs可为无线个域网、局域网、校园网、城域网的一系列应用提供高速无线宽带接入服务。虽然目前WMNs技术发展很快,但其协议栈各层仍存在许多有待研究的课题。首先简要介绍了无线网状网的结构与特点;随后重点分析了其主要的几个应用领域;最后探讨了WMNs各协议层的研究现状与关键技术,并分析了该技术存在的问题及未来的研究方向。     

基于网络利用率最大化来提高无线Mesh网络中TCP协议的传输性能

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), the performance of conventional TCP significantly deteriorates due to the unreliable wireless channel. To enhance TCP performance in WMNs, TCP/LT is proposed in this paper. It introduces fountain codes into packet reorganization in the protocol stack of mesh gateways and mesh clients. Furthermore, it is compatible with conventional TCP. Regarded as a Performance Enhancement Proxies (PEP), a mesh gateway buffers TCP packets into several blocks. It simultaneously processes them by using fountain encoders and then sends them to mesh clients. Apart from the improvement of the throughput of a unitary TCP flow, the entire network utility maximization can also be ensured by adjusting the scale of coding blocks for each TCP flow adaptively. Simulations show that TCP/LT presents high throughput gains over single TCP in lossy links of WMNs while preserving the fairness for multiple TCPs. As losses increase, the transmission delay of TCP/LT experiences a slow linear growth in contrast to the exponential growth of TCP.     

Fixed channel assignment algorithm for multi‐radio multi‐channel MESH networks

Recently, multi‐radio mesh technology in wireless networks has been under extensive research. This is because of its potential of overcoming the inherent wireless multi‐hop throughput, scalability and latency problems caused by the half‐duplex nature of the IEEE 802.11. The concept of deploying multiple radios in wireless network access points (APs) has shown a promising way to enhance the channel selection and the route formation while the MESH topology allows more fine‐grained interference management and topology control. Within this realm, given a set of end‐to‐end objectives, there are multiple issues that need to be identified when we consider the optimization problem for fixed multi‐channel multi‐hop wireless networks with multiple radios. This paper addresses the static channel assignment problem for multichannel multi‐radio static wireless mesh networks. We first discuss its similarities and differences with the channel assignment problem in cellular networks (WMN). Next, we present four metrics based on which mesh channel assignments can be obtained. Three of these metrics attempt to maximize simultaneous transmissions in a mesh network, either directly or indirectly. The fourth metric quantifies the ‘diversity’ of a particular assignment and can be used as a secondary criterion to the other three metrics. Related optimization models have also been developed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GI/Geom/1 queue based on communication model for mesh networks

In mesh networks architecture, it should be permitted to visit the mobile client points. Whereas in mesh networks environment, the main throughput flows usually communicate with the conventional wired network. The so‐called gateway nodes can link directly to traditional Ethernet, depending on these mesh nodes, and can obtain access to data sources that are related to the Ethernet. In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), the quantities of gateways are limited. The packet‐processing ability of settled wireless nodes is limited. Consequently, throughput loads of mesh nodes highly affect the network performance. In this paper, we propose a queuing system that relied on traffic model for WMNs. On the basis of the intelligent adaptivenes, the model considers the influences of interference. Using this intelligent model, service stations with boundless capacity are defined as between gateway and common nodes based on the largest hop count from the gateways, whereas the other nodes are modeled as service stations with certain capacity. Afterwards, we analyze the network throughput, mean packet loss ratio, and packet delay on each hop node with the adaptive model proposed. Simulations show that the intelligent and adaptive model presented is precise in modeling the features of traffic loads in WMNs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A survey of current architectures for connecting wireless mobile ad hoc networks to the Internet

Connecting wired and wireless networks, and particularly mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs) and the global Internet, is attractive in real‐world scenarios due to its usefulness and praticality. Because of the various architectural mismatches between the Internet and MANETs with regard to their communication topology, routing protocols, and operation, it is necessary to introduce a hybrid interface capable of connecting to the Internet using Mobile IP protocol and to MANETs owing to an ad hoc routing protocol. Specifically, the approaches available in the literature have introduced updated versions of Mobile IP agents or access points at the edge of the Internet to help MANET nodes get multi‐hop wireless Internet access. The main differences in the existing approaches concern the type of ad hoc routing protocol as well as the switching algorithm used by MANET nodes to change their current Mobile IP agents based on specific switching criteria. This paper surveys a variety of approaches to providing multi‐hop wireless Internet access to MANET nodes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shielding TCP from last hop wireless losses

The pervasiveness of the transport control protocol (TCP) and the proliferation of wireless local area networks (WLAN) of the 802.11 type make the topic of TCP performance over last hop wireless networks very relevant. The Snoop protocol, a link layer solution introduced several years ago to improve the performance of TCP in this scenario, has been shown to neglect its benefits to the most widely used TCP version, TCP SACK. In this paper, we introduce the TCP SACK‐Aware Snoop protocol to address this problem. Our results indicate that the TCP SACK‐Aware Snoop protocol improves the performance of TCP SACK by around 30% compared with the original Snoop protocol and by about 8% in an environment where no TCP enhancing mechanism is in place. In addition, we introduce further modifications to the proposed protocol to make its advantages available to any TCP sender. We also show that the mechanism does not introduce unfairness among TCP sources and somewhat protects TCP against UDP traffic. Our results show important throughput improvements to all TCP versions and demonstrate that the TCP SACK‐Aware Snoop protocol shields TCP from last hop wireless losses providing throughtput values very close to the maximum possible. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal TCP segment size for mobile server access over wireless links of cellular networks

Internet access from mobile phones over cellular networks suffers from severe bandwidth limitations and high bit error rates over wireless access links. Tailoring TCP connections to best fit the characteristics of this bottleneck link is thus very important for overall performance improvement. In this work, we propose a simple algorithm in deciding the optimal TCP segment size to maximize the utilization of the bottleneck wireless TCP connection for mobile contents server access, taking the dynamic TCP window variation into account. The proposed algorithm can be used when the product of the access rate of the wireless link and the propagation time to mobile contents servers is not large. With some numerical examples, it is shown that the optimal TCP segment size becomes a constant value when the TCP window size (WS) exceeds a threshold. One can set the maximum segment size (MSS) of a wireless TCP connection to this optimal segment size for mobile contents server access for maximum efficiency on the expensive wireless link. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adjusting the TCP Sending Rate and Retransmissions after Retransmission Timeouts Based on One-Way Queuing Delay in Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is regarded as a viable solution to provide broadband Internet access flexibly and cost efficiently. Improving the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in WMNs is an active research area in the networking community. The existing solutions proposed for improving the TCP performance has concentrated on differentiating the DATA packet drops in the forward direction induced by both network congestion as well as transmission errors. However, the recent studies show that in WMNs packet drops occur not only in the forward direction but also in the reverse direction particularly due to hidden terminal, hidden capture terminal, link asymmetry etc. The loss of ACK packets in the reverse direction cause frequent retransmission timeouts subject to needless retransmissions and unnecessary slowing down the growth of congestion window, which causes the performance degradation of TCP. In this paper, we introduce a sender side TCP algorithm, called detection of packet loss (DPL), which is capable to distinguish the type of packet drops either DATA or ACKs caused by transmission errors as well as network congestion based on one-way queuing delay and react accordingly. To justify our contributions, we implement DPL in Qualnet simulator and compare its performance against existing TCP solutions via extensive simulations. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately distinguish the type of packet drops whether it is a DATA or ACK caused by transmission error or congestion and can significantly improve the performance under a wide range of scenarios in WMNs.     

Performance evaluation of TCP algorithms in multi‐hop wireless packet networks

Wireless packet ad hoc networks are characterized by multi‐hop wireless connectivity and limited bandwidth competed among neighboring nodes. In this paper, we investigate and evaluate the performance of several prevalent TCP algorithms in this kind of network over the wireless LAN standard IEEE 802.11 MAC layer. After extensively comparing the existing TCP versions (including Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, Sack and Vegas) in simulations, we show that, in most cases, the Vegas version works best. We reveal the reason why other TCP versions perform worse than Vegas and show a method to avoid this by tuning a TCP parameter— maximum window size. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of these TCP algorithms when they run with the delayed acknowledgment (DA) option defined in IETF RFC 1122, which allows the TCP receiver to transmit an ACK for every two incoming packets. We show that the TCP connection can gain 15 to 32 per cent good‐put improvement by using the DA option. For all the TCP versions investigated in this work, the simulation results show that with the maximum window size set at approximately 4, TCP connections perform best and then all these TCP variants differ little in performance. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enhanced Active Queue Management for Multi-hop Networks

Wireless networks play a very important role in today’s modern world, convincingly surpassing the wired infrastructure in terms of popularity. Hence, it is important to ensure that services which access wired networks should also be accessible using a wireless network without any performance degradation. One of the most common variants in wireless communications is the Wireless Mesh Network (WMNs). WMNs exploit multi-hop wireless communications between wireless access points. Hence, the effective bandwidth decreases as the number of hops increases in a WMN, thus increasing latency and resulting in reduced performance. This may be due to spatial contention, multipath fading, interference or inefficient queuing mechanisms etc. Here we take queuing mechanisms into consideration and study the QMMN algorithm (Queue Management for Multi-hop Networks) which tends to improve throughput, fairness and reduce global synchronization problems. Based on our study, we implement a modified version of the QMMN algorithm, otherwise called the Enhanced QMMN (EQMMN) algorithm. EQMMN can be considered an effective algorithm which solves the problem of fairness between flows (either responsive or unresponsive) and eventually improves TCP throughput at wireless access points. Our experimental results prove that EQMMN algorithms have better performance characteristics such as throughput (TCP) and fairness index compared to QMMN algorithms.     

TCP Throughput Enhancement over Wireless Mesh Networks

TCP is the predominant technology used on the Internet to support upper layer applications with reliable data transfer and congestion control services. Furthermore, it is expected that traditional TCP applications (e.g., Internet access) will continue to constitute the major traffic component during the initial deployment of wireless mesh networks. However, TCP is known for its poor throughput performance in wireless multihop transmission environments. For this article, we conducted simulations to examine the impact of two channel interference problems, the hidden terminal and exposed terminal, on TCP transmissions over wireless mesh networks. We also propose a multichannel assignment algorithm for constructing a wireless mesh network that satisfies the spatial channel reuse property and eliminates the hidden terminal problem. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in improving the performance of TCP in wireless multihop 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.     

Performance analysis of channel estimation in amplify‐and‐forward multi‐hop direct forwarding wireless networks

In this paper, we study the performance of a training‐based least square (LS) and linear minimum mean‐square‐error (LMMSE) channel estimation for both hop‐by‐hop and multi‐hop direct forwarding wireless sensor networks over frequency‐selective fading channels. Specifically, to investigate the properties of the channel estimation, we accomplish a theoretical analysis of MSE in terms of various link parameters. From the performance evaluation, we analytically present the effects of the number of hops on the MSE performance for channel estimations in both multi‐hop networks. Interesting observations of MSE behaviors under various conditions are discussed, and the receiver complexity and channel equalization performance are also analyzed. Finally, through the computer simulations, the analytical results and detection performance are demonstrated. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A survey on congestion control for mobile ad hoc networks

Congestion control is a key problem in mobile ad hoc networks. The standard congestion control mechanism of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is not able to handle the special properties of a shared wireless multi‐hop channel well. In particular, the frequent changes of the network topology and the shared nature of the wireless channel pose significant challenges. Many approaches have been proposed to overcome these difficulties. In this paper, we give an overview over existing proposals, explain their key ideas and show their interrelations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Saturation throughput analysis of multi‐rate IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

IEEE 802.11 protocol supports adaptive rate mechanism, which selects the transmission rate according to the condition of the wireless channel, to enhance the system performance. Thus, research of multi‐rate IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) performance has become one of the hot research topics. In this paper, we study the performance of multi‐rate IEEE 802.11 MAC over a Gaussian channel. An accurate analytical model is presented to compute the system saturation throughput. We validate our model in both single‐rate and multi‐rate networks through various simulations. The results show that our model is accurate and channel error has a significant impact on system performance. In addition, our numerical results show that the performance of single‐rate IEEE 802.11 DCF with basic access method is better than that with RTS/CTS mechanism in a high‐rate and high‐load network and vice versa. In a multi‐rate network, the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF with RTS/CTS mechanism is better than that with basic access method in a congested and error‐prone wireless environment. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.