Minimum-energy multicast in mobile ad hoc networks using network coding

The minimum energy required to transmit one bit of information through a network characterizes the most economical way to communicate in a network. In this paper, we show that, under a layered model of wireless networks, the minimum energy-per-bit for multicasting in a mobile ad hoc network can be found by a linear program; the minimum energy-per-bit can be attained by performing network coding. Compared with conventional routing solutions, network coding not only allows a potentially lower energy-per-bit to be achieved, but also enables the optimal solution to be found in polynomial time, in sharp contrast with the NP-hardness of constructing the minimum-energy multicast tree as the optimal routing solution. We further show that the minimum energy multicast formulation is equivalent to a cost minimization with linear edge-based pricing, where the edge prices are the energy-per-bits of the corresponding physical broadcast links. This paper also investigates minimum energy multicasting with routing. Due to the linearity of the pricing scheme, the minimum energy-per-bit for routing is achievable by using a single distribution tree. A characterization of the admissible rate region for routing with a single tree is presented. The minimum energy-per-bit for multicasting with routing is found by an integer linear program. We show that the relaxation of this integer linear program, studied earlier in the Steiner tree literature, can now be interpreted as the optimization for minimum energy multicasting with network coding. In short, this paper presents a unifying study of minimum energy multicasting with network coding and routing.     

Adaptive audio streaming in mobile ad hoc networks using neural networks

We design a transport protocol that uses artificial neural networks (ANNs) to adapt the audio transmission rate to changing conditions in a mobile ad hoc network. The response variables of throughput, end-to-end delay, and jitter are examined. For each, statistically significant factors and interactions are identified and used in the ANN design. The efficacy of different ANN topologies are evaluated for their predictive accuracy. The Audio Rate Cognition (ARC) protocol incorporates the ANN topology that appears to be the most effective into the end-points of a (multi-hop) flow, using it to adapt its transmission rate. Compared to competing protocols for media streaming, ARC achieves a significant reduction in packet loss and increased goodput while satisfying the requirements of end-to-end delay and jitter. While the average throughput of ARC is less than that of TFRC, its average goodput is much higher. As a result, ARC transmits higher quality audio, minimizing root mean square and Itakura–Saito spectral distances, as well as several parametric distance measures. In particular, ARC minimizes linear predictive coding cepstral (sic) distance, which closely correlates to subjective audio measures.     

QoS multicast routing by using multiple paths/trees in wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, we investigate the issues of QoS multicast routing in wireless ad hoc networks. Due to limited bandwidth of a wireless node, a QoS multicast call could often be blocked if there does not exist a single multicast tree that has the requested bandwidth, even though there is enough bandwidth in the system to support the call. In this paper, we propose a new multicast routing scheme by using multiple paths or multiple trees to meet the bandwidth requirement of a call. Three multicast routing strategies are studied, SPT (shortest path tree) based multiple-paths (SPTM), least cost tree based multiple-paths (LCTM) and multiple least cost trees (MLCT). The final routing tree(s) can meet the user’s QoS requirements such that the delay from the source to any destination node shall not exceed the required bound and the aggregate bandwidth of the paths or trees shall meet the bandwidth requirement of the call. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of our three multicast routing strategies. The simulation results show that the new scheme improves the call success ratio and makes a better use of network resources.     

Scalable location guide overlay multicast in mobile ad hoc networks using tree partition scheme

Nodes mobility brings flinty challenges to multicast in Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs). To track nodes mobility, flooding messages are widely used for data delivery structure construction and maintenance in many multicast protocols. These periodic flooding messages significantly consume network resources, such as energy and bandwidth, and result in network collisions. To release data delivery structure maintenance onus, profited from GPS location service, a number of stateless location based multicast protocol were proposed, where a destination list is encapsulated into each data packet for data packet orientation. However, due to data packet capability limitation, the way of encapsulating a destination list in each data packet header restricts the protocol scalability. To solve the scalability issue of multicast protocols, we propose a Scalable Location Guide Overlay Multicast (SLGOM) for MANETs. Analysis and simulation results show that SLGOM achieves high performance in large multicast group and significantly improves the scalability of stateless multicast with respect to group size. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reducing multicast traffic load for cellular networks using ad hoc networks

There has been recent extensive research on integrating cellular networks and ad hoc networks to overcome the limitations of cellular networks. Although several schemes have been proposed to use such hybrid networks to improve the performance of individual multicast groups, they do not address quality of service (QoS) issues when multiple groups are present. This paper, on the other hand, considers an interesting scenario of hybrid networks when an ad hoc network cannot accommodate all the groups and a base station has to select a subset of groups to optimize its bandwidth savings and maximize the utilization of the ad hoc network while providing QoS support for multicast users. In this paper, a network model for multicast admission control that takes wireless interference into account is developed, the group selection problem is formulated as a multidimensional knapsack problem, and an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation and a polynomial-time dynamic algorithm are proposed. A distributed implementation of the dynamic algorithm in real systems is also examined. Simulation studies demonstrate that the dynamic algorithm is able to achieve very competitive performance under various conditions, in comparison with the optimal solution computed by the ILP approach.     

Distributed formation of core-based forwarding multicast trees in mobile ad hoc networks

A core-based forwarding multicast tree is a shortest path tree rooted at core node that distributes multicast packets to all group members via the tree after the packets are sent to the core. Traditionally, the bandwidth cost consumed by transmitting a packet from the core via the tree is evaluated by the total weights of all the edges. And, the bandwidth cost is minimized by constructing the multicast tree that has minimum total weights of edges to span all group members. However, when the local broadcast operation is used to multicast a packet, we found that the bandwidth cost is supposed to be evaluated by the total weights of all senders that include the core and all non-leaves. Since the multicast tree with the number of nodes greater than or equal to three has minimum bandwidth cost only when the core is not a leaf, it leads us to find the multicast tree with the minimum number of non-leaves when each sender node has a unit weight. However, no polynomial time approximation scheme can be found for the minimum non-leaf multicast tree problem unless P = NP since the problem is not only NP-hard but also MAX-SNP hard. Thus, a heuristic is proposed to dynamically reduce the number of non-leaves in the multicast tree. Experimental results show that the multicast tree after the execution of our method has smaller number of non-leaves than others in the geometrically distributed network model.     

A study of different types of attacks on multicast in mobile ad hoc networks

We present a simulation-based study of the impacts of different types of attacks on mesh-based multicast in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We consider the most common types of attacks, namely rushing attack, blackhole attack, neighbor attack and jellyfish attack. Specifically, we study how the number of attackers and their positions affect the performance metrics of a multicast session such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, end-to-end delay, and delay jitter. We also examine rushing attackers’ success rates of invading into the routing mesh when the number of attackers and their positions vary. The results enable us to suggest measures to minimize the impacts of the above types of attacks on multicast in MANETs.     

Probabilistic reliable multicast in ad hoc networks

When striving for reliability, multicast protocols are most commonly designed as deterministic solutions. Such an approach seems to make the reasoning about reliability guarantees (traditionally, binary, “all-or-nothing”-like) in the face of packet losses and/or node crashes. It is however precisely this determinism that tends to become a limiting factor when aiming at both reliability and scalability, particularly in highly dynamic networks, e.g., ad hoc networks. Gossip-based multicast protocols appear to be a viable path towards providing multicast reliability guarantees. Such protocols embrace the non-deterministic nature of ad hoc networks, providing analytically predictable probabilistic reliability guarantees at a reasonable overhead.

This paper presents the Route Driven Gossip (RDG) protocol, a gossip-based multicast protocol designed precisely to meet a more practical specification of probabilistic reliability in ad hoc networks. Our RDG protocol can be deployed on any basic on-demand routing protocol, achieving a high level of reliability without relying on any inherent multicast primitive. We illustrate our RDG protocol by layering it on top of the “bare” Dynamic Source Routing protocol, and convey our claims of reliability and scalability through both analysis and simulation.     

Location tracking using quorums in mobile ad hoc networks

We explore applications of quorum systems to the problem of tracking locations of mobile users in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The location tracking system uses biquorum systems, a generalization of traditional quorum systems. We performed extensive simulations of the location tracking system. The simulation results show that our strict biquorum implementation has better performance than the traditional strict quorum implementations. Moreover, our results show that randomized dynamic quorum implementations have better overall performance than strict (bi)quorum implementations.     

Stable routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks using mobile agent

Wireless ad hoc networks are growing important because of their mobility, versatility, and ability to work with fewer infrastructures. The mobile ad hoc network is an autonomous system consisting of mobile nodes connected with wireless links. Establishing a path between two nodes is a complex task in wireless networks. It is still more complex in the wireless mobile ad hoc network because every node is no longer as an end node and an intermediate node. In this paper, it focuses on design of connectionless routing protocol for the wireless ad hoc networks based on the mobile agent concept. The proposed model tries to discover the best path taking into consideration some concerns like bandwidth, reliability, and congestion of the link. The proposed model has been simulated and tested under various wireless ad hoc network environments with the help of a different number of nodes. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is more feasible for providing reliable paths between the source and destination with the minimum control message packets over the network. It has delivered more number of packets to the destination over the network. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An efficient mesh‐based multicast routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Mesh‐based multicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) build multiple paths from senders to receivers to deliver packets even in the presence of links breaking. This redundancy results in high reliability/robustness but may significantly increase packet overhead. This paper proposes a mesh‐based multicast protocol, called centered protocol for unified multicasting through announcements (CPUMA), that achieves comparable reliability as existing mesh‐based multicast protocols, however, with significantly much less data overhead. In CPUMA, a distributed core‐selection and maintenance algorithm is used to find the source‐centric center of a shared mesh. We leverage data packets to center the core of each multicast group shared mesh instead of using GPS or any pre‐assignment of cores to groups (the case of existing protocols). The proposed centering scheme allows reducing data packet overhead and creating forwarding paths toward the nearest mesh member instead of the core to reduce latency. We show, via simulations, that CPUMA outperforms existing multicast protocols in terms of data packet overhead, and latency while maintaining a constant or better packet delivery ratio, at the cost of a small increase in control overhead in a few scenarios. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A novel overlay multicast protocol in mobile ad hoc networks: design and evaluation

Despite significant research in mobile ad hoc networks, multicast still remains a research challenge. Recently, overlay multicast protocols for MANET have been proposed to enhance the packet delivery ratio by reducing the number of reconfigurations caused by nongroup members' unexpected migration in tree or mesh structure. However, since data is delivered by using replication at each group member, delivery failure on one group member seriously affects all descendent members' packet delivery ratio. In addition, delivery failure can occur by collision between numbers of unicast packets where group members densely locate. In this paper, we propose a new overlay multicast protocol to enhance packet delivery ratio in two ways. One is to construct a new type of overlay data delivery tree, and the other is to apply a heterogeneous data forwarding scheme depending on the density of group members. While the former aims to minimize influence of delivery failure on one group member, the latter intends to reduce excessive packet collision where group members are densely placed. Our simulation results show distinct scalability improvement of our approach without regard to the number of group members or source nodes.     

A multiple access collision avoidance protocol for multicast services in mobile ad hoc networks

In order to improve cross-layer optimization, we propose a multiple access collision avoidance protocol that combines RTS/CTS with scheduling algorithms to support the multicast routing protocol. We avoid collision by including additional information in the RTS. The proposed scheme, together with extra benefits, such as power saving, reliable data transmission and higher channel utilization compared with CSMA or multiple unicast, enables the support of multicast services in mobile ad hoc networks.     

The diameter of mobile ad hoc networks

With the prevalence of mobile devices, it is of much interest to study the properties of mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we extend the concept of diameter from static ad hoc network to mobile ad hoc network, which is the expected number of rounds for one node to transmit a message to all other nodes in the network, reflecting the worst end‐to‐end delay between any two node. Specifically, we investigate the diameter of identically and independently mobility model in cell‐partitioned network and random walk mobility model in two‐dimensional torus network, achieving the boundary , when (k=Ω(n)), and O(k log2k), respectively, where n is the number of nodes and k is the number of cells of network and especially under random walk mobility model . A comparison is made among the diameter of mobile ad hoc networks under identically and independently mobility model, random walk mobility model and static ad hoc network, showing that mobility dramatically decreases the diameter of the network and speed is an essential and decisive factor of diameter. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contention-based forwarding for mobile ad hoc networks

Existing position-based unicast routing algorithms which forward packets in the geographic direction of the destination require that the forwarding node knows the positions of all neighbors in its transmission range. This information on direct neighbors is gained by observing beacon messages each node sends out periodically.

Due to mobility, the information that a node receives about its neighbors becomes outdated, leading either to a significant decrease in the packet delivery rate or to a steep increase in load on the wireless channel as node mobility increases. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to perform position-based unicast forwarding without the help of beacons. In our contention-based forwarding scheme (CBF) the next hop is selected through a distributed contention process based on the actual positions of all current neighbors. For the contention process, CBF makes use of biased timers. To avoid packet duplication, the first node that is selected suppresses the selection of further nodes. We propose three suppression strategies which vary with respect to forwarding efficiency and suppression characteristics. We analyze the behavior of CBF with all three suppression strategies and compare it to an existing greedy position-based routing approach by means of simulation with ns-2. Our results show that CBF significantly reduces the load on the wireless channel required to achieve a specific delivery rate compared to the load a beacon-based greedy forwarding strategy generates.     

Cross layer scheme for quality of service aware multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Wireless Networks - A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is composed of mobile nodes without any infrastructure where member nodes easily can leave or join the network. This issue provides a dynamic...     

QoS multicast routing in cognitive radio ad hoc networks

In this paper, we discussed the issues of QoS multicast routing in cognitive radio ad hoc networks. The problem of our concern was: given a cognitive radio ad hoc network and a QoS multicast request, how to find a multicast tree so that the total bandwidth consumption of the multicast is minimized while the QoS requirements are met. We proposed two methods to solve it. One is a two‐phase method. In this method, we first employed a minimal spanning tree‐based algorithm to construct a multicast tree and then proposed a slot assignment algorithm to assign timeslots to the tree links such that the bandwidth consumption of the tree is minimized. The other is an integrated method that considers the multicast routing together with the slot assignment. Extensive simulations were conducted to show the performance of our proposed methods. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive multicast with partially overlapped channels in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicle to many vehicles (V2MV) multicast is an attractive application to provide vehicle safety and traffic control information, urban sensing and multimedia content sharing in vehicular ad hoc networks. Due to the limitation of DSRC channels, Wi-Fi channels can be alternative to realize the multicast in the vehicular networks. However, the deployment using the Wi-Fi in ISM bands is challenging due to the interference from increasing residential Wi-Fi users as well as inter-vehicle interference. In this study, we propose a cognitive multi-channel, multi-radio multicast protocol, CoCast, borrowing concept of recently developed cognitive radio techniques, which can help overcome such interference, with spectrum sensing and multi-channel assignment. Unfortunately, number of orthogonal channels is very limited in the ISM band to avoid interference in urban Wi-Fi cloud. Therefore, we apply two additional features to use partially overlapped channels: parallel frame transmission over OFDM subchannels to exploit spectral diversity, and network coding for the subchannel frames. Our evaluation results show that the reliability of multicast communication among vehicles in a dense urban environment can be significantly improved with these protocol extensions.