无线网状网的QoS研究

作为下一代无线通信网络的关键技术,无线网状网能够融合异构网络,满足多类型的业务需求,因此必须提供一定的服务质量(QoS)保证.对目前各种QoS体系结构进行了分析,讨论了无线网状网的QoS体系结构.针对无线网状网网络层以下各层的QoS问题,对近年来国内外在功率控制、无线环境感知、支持QoS的MAC协议、QoS路由以及跨层QoS设计等方向所取得的研究成果进行了全面的概括总结和比较分析.最后对未来的研究发展趋势提出了自己的观点.     

Performance evaluation for on-demand routing protocols based on OPNET modules in wireless mesh networks

In wireless networks, users expect to get access to the network securely and seamlessly to share the data flow of access points anytime and anywhere. However, either point-to-point or point-to-multipoint methods in traditional wireless networks make the network bandwidth decrease rapidly, which cannot meet the requirements of users. Recently, a new wireless broadband access network, wireless mesh networks (WMNs), has emerged. As one of the key technologies in WMNs, wireless routing protocols plays an important role in performance optimization of WMNs. Therefore, in this paper, we address the on-demand routing protocols by focusing on dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol and ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol in WMNs. Then, we use the OPNET modules to establish the simulation models of DSR and AODV protocols in WMNs. Simulation and results show that, DSR protocol that is based on the dynamic source routing is not suitable for wireless transmission, while AODV routing protocol that is based on the purpose-driven routing is suitable for wireless transmission with rapid change of network topology.     

A mobility management scheme for wireless mesh networks based on a hybrid routing protocol

Recent advances in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have overcome the drawbacks of traditional wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. WMNs will play a leading role in the next generation of networks, and the question of how to provide seamless mobility management for WMNs is the driving force behind the research. The inherent characteristics of WMNs, such as relatively static backbones and highly mobile clients, require new mobility management solutions to be designed and implemented.In this paper, a hybrid routing protocol for forwarding packets is proposed: this involves both link layer routing and network layer routing. Based on the hybrid routing protocol, a mobility management scheme for WMNs is presented. Both intra-domain and inter-domain mobility management have been designed to support seamless roaming in WiFi-based WMNs. During intra-domain handoff, gratuitous ARP messages are used to provide new routing information, thus avoiding re-routing and location update. For inter-domain handoff, redundant tunnels are removed in order to minimize forwarding latency. Comprehensive simulation results illustrate that our scheme has low packet latency, low packet loss ratio and short handoff latency. As a result, real-time applications over 802.11 WMNs such as VoIP can be supported.     

Routing protocols in wireless mesh networks: challenges and design considerations

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are an emerging technology that could revolutionize the way wireless network access is provided. The interconnection of access points using wireless links exhibits great potential in addressing the “last mile” connectivity issue. To realize this vision, it is imperative to provide efficient resource management. Resource management encompasses a number of different issues, including routing. Although a profusion of routing mechanisms has been proposed for other wireless networks, the unique characteristics of WMNs (e.g., wireless backbone) suggest that WMNs demand a specific solution. To have a clear and precise focus on future research in WMN routing, the characteristics of WMNs that have a strong impact on routing must be identified. Then a set of criteria is defined against which the existing routing protocols from ad hoc, sensor, and WMNs can be evaluated and performance metrics identified. This will serve as the basis for deriving the key design features for routing in wireless mesh networks. Thus, this paper will help to guide and refocus future works in this area.

SafeMesh: A wireless mesh network routing protocol for incident area communications

Reliable broadband communication is becoming increasingly important during disaster recovery and emergency response operations. In situations where infrastructure-based communication is not available or has been disrupted, an Incident Area Network needs to be dynamically deployed, i.e. a temporary network that provides communication services for efficient crisis management at an incident site. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with self-healing and self-configuring capabilities. These features, combined with the ability to provide wireless broadband connectivity at a comparably low cost, make WMNs a promising technology for incident management communications. This paper specifically focuses on hybrid WMNs, which allow both mobile client devices as well as dedicated infrastructure nodes to form the network and provide routing and forwarding functionality. Hybrid WMNs are the most generic and most flexible type of mesh networks and are ideally suited to meet the requirements of incident area communications. However, current wireless mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols do not perform well in hybrid WMN, and are not able to establish stable and high throughput communication paths. One of the key reasons for this is their inability to exploit the typical high degree of heterogeneity in hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh, the routing protocol presented in this paper, addresses the limitations of current mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols in the context of hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh is based on the well-known AODV routing protocol, and implements a number of modifications and extensions that significantly improve its performance in hybrid WMNs. This is demonstrated via an extensive set of simulation results. We further show the practicality of the protocol through a prototype implementation and provide performance results obtained from a small-scale testbed deployment.     

Matrix-based pairwise key establishment for wireless mesh networks

Wireless communication in wireless mesh networks (WMNs), like other types of wireless networks, is vulnerable to many malicious activities such as eavesdropping. As one of the fundamental security technologies, pairwise key establishment has been widely studied to secure wireless communication. In this paper, we propose a new matrix-based pairwise key establishment scheme for mesh clients in WMNs. A fact in WMNs is that mesh routers are more powerful than mesh clients, in both communication and storage. Motivated by this fact, expensive operations can be delegated to mesh routers to alleviate the overhead of mesh clients when establishing pairwise keys between them. Compared with other matrix-based schemes, our scheme has significant advantages: any two mesh clients can directly establish pairwise keys while communication and storage costs of mesh clients are significantly reduced.     

无线Mesh网络中多信道生成树路由算法

无线Mesh网络是一种特殊的AdHoc网络。它易于部署、安装,能有效地构建无线骨干网,通常被用作宽带Internet接入和扩展无线LAN的覆盖范围。针对无线Mesh网络的特点,提出了一种不同于一般MANET路由协议的路由算法。该算法基于网络拓扑生成树,使用多个无重叠信道;在解决信道分配问题的同时,兼顾信道多样性和信道重用,更好地利用无线频谱资源,支持链路并行传输。     

Design and implementation of MobiSEC: A complete security architecture for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged recently as a technology for next-generation wireless networking. They consist of mesh routers and clients, where mesh routers are almost static and form the backbone of WMNs. WMNs provide network access for both mesh and conventional clients.In this paper we propose MobiSEC, a complete security architecture that provides both access control for mesh users and routers as well as a key distribution scheme that supports layer-2 encryption to ensure security and data confidentiality of all communications that occur in the WMN.MobiSEC extends the IEEE 802.11i standard exploiting the routing capabilities of mesh routers; after connecting to the access network as generic wireless clients, new mesh routers authenticate to a central server and obtain a temporary key that is used both to prove their credentials to neighbor nodes and to encrypt all the traffic transmitted on the wireless backbone links.A key feature in the design of MobiSEC is its independence from the underlying wireless technology used by network nodes to form the backbone. Furthermore, MobiSEC allows seamless mobility of both mesh clients and routers.MobiSEC has been implemented and integrated in MobiMESH, a WMN implementation that provides a complete framework for testing and analyzing the behavior of a mesh network in real-life environments. Moreover, extensive simulations have been performed in large-scale network scenarios using Network Simulator.Numerical results show that our proposed architecture considerably increases the WMN security, with a negligible impact on the network performance, thus representing an effective solution for wireless mesh networking.     

User density sensitive P2P streaming in wireless mesh networks

Link rate allocation is very important for supporting high video playback rate in Peer-to-Peer video streaming. Although many studies can be found on resource allocation in P2P streaming in wired networks, very few studies have studied the problem in wireless networks, especially in Wireless multi-hop Mesh Networks (WMNs), which is still challenging. To maximize the users’ satisfaction of P2P streaming in WMNs, this paper focuses on link rate allocation problem and proposes a fully distributed algorithm to efficiently utilize the upload and download bandwidth of wireless mesh nodes. We first build an efficient P2P streaming system based on the experimental results from real deployment of our wireless mesh testbed. Then we design an efficient distributed algorithm based on the solution to a linear optimization model, which optimizes towards a user-density-related objective to decide the best streaming rates among peers. Our scheme is resilient to network dynamics that is characteristic in wireless multi-hop peer-to-peer networks. The simulation experiments demonstrate the significant performance enhancement by using the proposed rate allocation algorithm in WMNs.     

On-demand channel reservation scheme for common traffic in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently gained momentum as a new broadband internet access technology to provide internet traffic. These networks have unique characteristics that make them different from ad hoc networks. These differences are as follows. First, WMNs are composed of static mesh routers that are equipped with multiple radio interfaces and turn each interface into a non-overlapping channel. These additional interfaces can create multiple concurrent links between adjacent nodes. Second, most of the traffic in WMNs is directed towards the gateway. Third, both local traffic and internet traffic are relayed by the mesh router to indeed destination. The Multi-Radio Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV-MR) developed to support multi-radio and does not take into account above-mentioned WMNs characteristics. In this paper, we propose an on-demand channel reservation scheme to reserve some of mesh router radio interfaces to support the gateway traffic while the remaining interfaces can be used to support the local traffic. Our scheme establishes high throughput paths for the traffic destined at the gateway, reduces the intra-flow and inter-flow interferences as well as to support full duplex node transmission.The scheme allows the gateway to assign a list of channels for each received gateway routing discovery message. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks.     

Enhancing multi-hop communication over multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks: A cross-layer approach

The multi-channel multi-radio technology represents a straightforward approach to expand the capacity of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in broadband wireless access scenarios. However, the effective leveraging of this technology in WMNs requires (i) enhanced MAC protocols, to coordinate the access to multiple channels with a limited number of radio interfaces, and (ii) efficient channel allocation schemes, to mitigate the impact of co-channel interference. The design of channel assignment schemes and MAC protocols is strictly interrelated, so that joint design should be considered to optimize the mesh network performance. In this paper, a channel assignment and fast MAC architecture (CAFMA) is proposed, which exploits the benefits provided by the multi-channel multi-radio technology to (i) enhance the performance of multi-hop communications, (ii) maximize the resource utilization, and (iii) support differentiation of traffic classes with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. CAFMA is designed with a cross-layer approach and includes (1) a novel MAC scheme, which provides multi-channel coordination and fast data relaying over multi-hop topologies, and (2) a distributed channel allocation scheme, which works in cooperation with the routing protocol. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of CAFMA when compared with other single-layer and cross-layer solutions for multi-radio multi-channel WMNs.     

GLBM: A new QoS aware multicast scheme for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been attracting significant attention due to their promising technology. The WMN technology is becoming a major avenue for the fourth generation of wireless mobility. Communication in large-scale wireless networks can create bottlenecks for scalable implementations of computationally intensive applications. A class of crucially important communication patterns that have already received considerable attention in this regard are group communication operations, since these inevitably place a high demand on network bandwidth and have a consequent impact on algorithm execution times. Multicast communication has been among the most primitive group capabilities of any message passing in networks. It is central to many important distributed applications in science and engineering and fundamental to the implementation of higher-level communication operations such as gossip, gather, and barrier synchronisation. Existing solutions offered for providing multicast communications in WMN have severe restriction in terms of almost all performance characteristics. Consequently, there is a need for the design and analysis of new efficient multicast communication schemes for this promising network technology. Hence, the aim of this study is to tackle the challenges posed by the continuously growing need for delivering efficient multicast communication over WMN. In particular, this study presents a new load balancing aware multicast algorithm with the aim of enhancing the QoS in the multicast communication over WMNs. Our simulations experiments show that our proposed multicast algorithm exhibits superior performance in terms of delay, jitter and throughput, compared to the most well known multicast algorithms.     

Securing Wireless Mesh Networks

Now found in domestic, commercial, industrial, military, and healthcare applications, wireless networks are becoming ubiquitous. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) combine the robustness and performance of conventional infrastructure networks with the large service area and self-organizing and self-healing properties of mobile ad hoc networks. In this article, the authors consider the problem of ensuring security in WMNs, introduce the IEEE 802.11s draft standard, and discuss the open security threats faced at the network and data-link layers.     

A survey of inter-flow network coding in wireless mesh networks with unicast traffic

Wireless network performance is much restricted by the unreliability of the wireless channel and the competition among different flows for the shared network resources such as the bandwidth. Network coding is a technique that exploits the broadcast of the wireless channel and can effectively address these two restrictions to improve network performance. For example, with network coding, an intermediate node of multiple flows can encode packets from these flows into one mixed packet and serve these flows using only one transmission instead of multiple transmissions in the traditional way, thus mitigating the competition among flows. Inter-flow network coding (XNC), as a form of network coding, considers encoding packets from different flows, and it can benefit wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with either reliable or lossy links. In this paper, we present a survey on XNC in WMNs for unicast traffic, with various design factors related to XNC being covered. Specifically, our survey considers two types of WMNs, one with reliable links and the other with lossy links, and we study how XNC can be effectively utilized in both two types of WMNs. In addition to the benefits of XNC, we also present in this survey some drawbacks of applying XNC in WMNs. With this paper, we believe that readers will have a more thorough understanding of XNC on how it effectively mitigates the resource competition among flows and the channel unreliability problem in WMNs.     

无线网状网跨层路由的研究

目前,无线网状网跨层路由设计方兴未艾,以往无线路由设计是基于最小跳数的,缺少对无线网状网特性的综合考虑,并不能充分发挥出无线网状网的优势。该文提出了基于"队列负载率"和"链路传输效率"的跨层路由协议算法,通过将MAC层的网络状态信息传递给网络层的路由代理,以便选择负载较小的最佳路由。通过仿真可以发现,改文提出的路由不仅显著提高了吞吐量,而且使包的投递更加可靠,提高了QoS。     

SRPM: Secure Routing Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Infrastructure Based Wireless Mesh Networks

Infrastructure based IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are new paradigm of low cost broadband technology. The large scale city-wide community-based coverage and multi-hop architecture are such characteristics which are vulnerable to network layer threats, and the adversary can exploit them for large scale degradation of the broadband services. So far many secure routing protocols have been proposed for ad-hoc networks, however, due to the different nature and characteristics; they cannot perform well in a WMN environment. In this paper, we discuss the limitations and challenges as well as propose an exclusive secure routing protocol for an infrastructure based wireless mesh (SRPM) network. SRPM is robust against a variety of multi-hop threats and performs well over a range of scenarios we tested.     

MAC protocols over wireless mesh networks: problems and perspective

The wireless mesh network (WMN) has been an emerging technology in recent years. Because the transmission medium used in networking backhaul access points (APs) is radio, the wireless mesh network is not only easy and cost effective in deployment, but also has good scalability in coverage area and capacity. This paper provides an overview of distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols, discusses their features and suitability for WMNs and identifies potential challenges and open research issues. Specifically, we overview the technical medium access control of the new standard for WMNs, the mesh deployments of the IEEE 802.16 MAC and we focus on the coordinated distributed scheduling (CDS) scheme of this. Moreover, we assess the fitness of the IEEE 802.11 over wireless mesh networks. Through the study of existing solutions, we analyze the previous work and sketch the contours of the directions to achieve the throughput and the latency that must be guaranteed in WMNs. In this context we suggest future enhancements to the standard that could increase throughput, while also increase the robustness, without complexity increases and propose and evaluate a new distributed scheduling scheme (DSS). We compared the CDS and the DSS and simulations studies document and confirm the positive characteristics of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we proposed an analytical model to assess a lower bound in terms of delay.     

一种高吞吐量的IEEE 802．11Mesh网AP选择算法

现有的IEEE802．11mesh网访问点（AP）选择算法仅仅基于对mesh用户周围链路质量的测量，无法使用户获得高性能的Internet访问。本文提出了一种基于期望传输吞吐量（Expected Transmission Throughput，EXT）的AP选择算法，该算法同时考虑了mesh路由器访问网关的能力以及用户与路由器的连接时间，目的是使用户选择能够获得最大吞吐量的路由器进行连接。同时，本文针对mesh网络特点和用户的移动方式给出了实际可行的算法实现过程。本文使用NS2对算法进行了仿真，结果证明与传统的基于接收信号强度指示（RSSI）的算法相比，基于EXT的AP选择算法可以使用户的访问吞吐量得到较大提高。     

The WICKPro protocol with the Packet Delivery Ratio metric

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with chain topologies are very useful in road and railroad transportation or in tunnel and mine applications. The proposed protocols for WMNs usually support best-effort traffic or some kind of Quality of Service (QoS). However, some applications such as remote-controlled machines in industrial control networks have hard real-time (HRT) requirements, i.e., strict deadlines. For this reason, this paper incorporates the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) metric into the WICKPro (WIreless Chain networK Protocol) protocol, a HRT protocol for WMNs with chain topologies which uses a token-passing approach. WICKPro is a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol based on the ideas of the Timed-token protocol and the cyclic executive. The incorporation of the PDR metric lets calculate the needed time to be reserved where packet retransmissions can be accommodated while satisfying HRT traffic constraints. Moreover, the feasibility of using the PDR metric in a token-passing protocol is shown. Since WICKPro has been designed to work on top of IEEE 802.11, we made a testbed using commercial 802.11 wireless cards and compared the WICKPro’s performance with the 802.11 protocol and three specific protocols for WMNs with chain topologies.     

Efficient link scheduling for online admission control of real-time traffic in wireless mesh networks

Link scheduling is used in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to guarantee interference-free transmission on the shared wireless medium in a time division multiple access approach. Several papers in the literature address the problem of link scheduling guaranteeing a minimum throughput to the flows traversing the WMN. However, none of the existing works address the problem of computing a schedule that guarantees that pre-specified end-to-end delay constraints are met. In this paper, we make a first step forward in this direction by defining a link scheduling algorithm that works in sink-tree WMNs, i.e. those whose traffic is routed towards a common sink (i.e. the Internet gateway). Our iterative algorithm exploits a delay-based admission control procedure, devised through Network Calculus, which solves an optimization problem and tests the feasibility of a schedule from the point of view of delay guarantees. Thanks to a clever solution approach for the optimization problem, the iterative algorithm computes feasible solutions in affordable times for networks of several tens of nodes, and is thus amenable to online admission control of real-time traffic.