On Accurate and Asymmetry-Aware Measurement of Link Quality in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper presents a highly efficient and accurate link-quality measurement framework, called Efficient and Accurate link-quality monitoR (EAR), for multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that has several salient features. First, it exploits three complementary measurement schemes: passive, cooperative, and active monitoring. By adopting one of these schemes dynamically and adaptively, EAR maximizes the measurement accuracy, and its opportunistic use of the unicast application traffic present in the network minimizes the measurement overhead. Second, EAR effectively identifies the existence of wireless link asymmetry by measuring the quality of each link in both directions of the link, thus improving the utilization of network capacity by up to 114%. Finally, its cross-layer architecture across both the network layer and the IEEE 802.11-based device driver makes EAR easily deployable in existing multihop wireless mesh networks without system recompilation or MAC firmware modification. EAR has been evaluated extensively via both ns-2-based simulation and experimentation on our Linux-based implementation in a real-life testbed. Both simulation and experimentation results have shown EAR to provide highly accurate link-quality measurements with minimum overhead.      

Provisioning of Parameterized Quality of Service in 802.11e Based Wireless Mesh Networks

There has been a growing interest in the use of wireless mesh networks. Today’s wireless technology enables very high data rate up to hundreds of Megabits per second, which creates the high demand of supporting real-time multimedia applications over wireless mesh networks. Hence it is imperative to support quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we design a framework to provide parameterized QoS in 802.11e based wireless mesh networks. Our framework consists of admission control algorithms and scheduling algorithms, which aim at supporting constant bit-rate (CBR) traffic flows, as well as variable bit-rate (VBR) traffic flows. We first present deterministic end-to-end delay bounds for CBR traffic. We then prove that the delay of VBR traffic can be bounded if the traffic flow conforms to a leaky-bucket regulator. We further study different admission control algorithms for VBR traffic. Our simulation results show that, by taking advantage of statistical multiplexing, much more traffic flows can be admitted.     

Angular MAC: a framework for directional antennas in wireless mesh networks

Capacity of wireless mesh networks can be enhanced through the use of smart directional antennas, which not only enable nodes to have high quality links but also increase network throughput by allowing spatial reuse. This paper proposes a new MAC protocol and framework, called Angular MAC (ANMAC) that enables directional antennas in wireless mesh networks. The protocols and algorithms of the ANMAC framework fit well with the requirements of mesh networks such as neighbor discovery and self-configuration, while providing significant throughput enhancements. The throughput enhancements are proven by comprehensive simulations with realistic antenna patterns, including performance comparisons of ANMAC with directional schemes using a similar node architecture and omni 802.11. Also, the effect of contention window size is analyzed and a dynamic contention window adaptation algorithm is proposed to maximize the throughput of the self-configuring mesh network, by taking instantaneous traffic conditions into account.     

Signal strength based link sensing for mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobility causes frequent link failures in ad-hoc networks. This results in a severe degradation of performance specially in case of high mobility of nodes. This is because the routing protocols for ad-hoc networks are not equipped to handle high mobility. In this paper, we have presented a new link management algorithm to locally manage links. This new mechanism is based on signal strength measurements. Researchers over the years have presented approaches which use signal strength measurements but their focus has been on re-active protocols while our algorithm is aimed at pro-active protocols. Pro-active protocols are used since they provide greater flexibility to take advantage of the mesh configuration. We develop the hysteresis mechanism provided by OLSR, based on hello packets, to include signal strength measurements. The mechanism in OLSR uses Hello packets received/lost to decide to establish link or not. The problem with this approach arises when there is high mobility in which case the time to break the link and use a new path becomes significant. To overcome this, we propose to use signal strength to determine if the link-quality is improving or deteriorating. This combination of the two mechanisms, makes the link management more robust and also helps in anticipating link breakages thereby greatly improving performance.     

Understanding interference and carrier sensing in wireless mesh networks [Accepted from Open Call]

Wireless mesh networks aim to provide high-speed Internet service without costly network infrastructure deployment and maintenance. The main obstacle in achieving high-capacity wireless mesh networks is interference between the mesh links. In this article, we analyze the carrier sensing and interference relations between two wireless links and measure the impact of these relations on link capacity on an indoor 802.11a mesh network testbed. We show that asymmetric carrier sensing and/or interference relations commonly exist in wireless mesh networks, and we study their impact on the link capacity and fair-channel access. In addition, we investigate the effect of traffic rate on link capacity in the presence of interference.     

High-throughput multicast routing metrics in wireless mesh networks

The stationary nature of nodes in a mesh network has shifted the main design goal of routing protocols from maintaining connectivity between source and destination nodes to finding high-throughput paths between them. Numerous link-quality-based routing metrics have been proposed for choosing high-throughput routing paths in recent years. In this paper, we study routing metrics for high-throughput tree or mesh construction in multicast protocols. We show that there is a fundamental difference between unicast and multicast routing in how data packets are transmitted at the link layer, and accordingly how the routing metrics for unicast routing should be adapted for high-throughput multicast routing. We propose a low-overhead adaptive online algorithm to incorporate link-quality metrics to a representative multicast routing protocol. We then study the performance improvement achieved by using different link-quality-based routing metrics via extensive simulation and experiments on a mesh-network testbed, using ODMRP as a representative multicast protocol.Our extensive simulation studies show that: (1) ODMRP equipped with any of the link-quality-based routing metrics can achieve higher throughput than the original ODMRP. In particular, under a tree topology, on average, ODMRP enhanced with link-quality routing metrics achieve up to 34% higher throughput than the original ODMRP under low multicast sending rate; (2) the improvement reduces to 21% under high multicast sending rate due to higher interference experienced by the data packets from the probe packets; (3) heavily penalizing lossy links is an effective way in the link-quality metric design to avoid low-throughput paths; and (4) the path redundancy from a mesh data dissemination topology in mesh-based multicast protocols provides another degree of robustness to link characteristics and reduces the additional throughput gain achieved by using link-quality-based routing metrics. Finally, our experiments on an eight-node testbed show that on average, ODMRP using SPP and PP achieves 14% and 17% higher throughput over ODMRP, respectively, validating the simulation results.     

无线Mesh网络中的虫洞攻击检测研究

为了有效检测出无线mesh网络中的虫洞攻击,针对微软提出的支持多射频的链路质量源路由MR-LQSR(multi-radio link-quality souse routing)协议提出了一种虫洞攻击模型,并根据虫洞攻击及无线mesh网的特点,在基于端到端的虫洞攻击检测算法、投票机制、邻居检测机制和基于身份加密技术的基础上提出一种基于端到端的虫洞攻击检测机制.最后通过理论分析和实验证实了该机制能有效地抵御无线mesh网中的虫洞攻击和提高无线mesh网的安全性.     

Secure group communication in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology that offers low-cost community wireless services. The community-oriented nature of WMNs facilitates group applications, such as webcast, distance learning, online gaming, video conferencing, and multimedia broadcasting. Security is critical for the deployment of these services. Previous work focused primarily on MAC and routing protocol security, while application-level security has received relatively little attention. In this paper we focus on providing data confidentiality for group communication in WMNs. Compared to other network environments, WMNs present new challenges and opportunities in designing such protocols. We propose a new protocol framework, Secure Group Overlay Multicast (SeGrOM), that employs decentralized group membership, promotes localized communication, and leverages the wireless broadcast nature to achieve efficient and secure group communication. We analyze the performance and discuss the security properties of our protocols. We demonstrate through simulations that our protocols provide good performance and incur a significantly smaller overhead than a baseline centralized protocol optimized for WMNs.     

A flow-based network monitoring framework for wireless mesh networks

As an extension of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, wireless mesh networks recently were developed as a key solution to provide high-quality multimedia services and applications, such as voice, data, and video, over wireless personal area networks, wireless local area networks, and wireless metropolitan area networks. A WMN has a hybrid network infrastructure with a backbone and an access network and usually is operated in both ad hoc and infrastructure modes with self-configuration and self-organization capabilities. In this article, we review security challenges, attacks, and countermeasures in the physical, medium access control (MAC), and network layers of wireless mesh backbone and access networks. We then extend the concept of traffic flow from IP networks and define meshflow in wireless mesh networks. Based on this new concept, we propose a comprehensive framework to realize network monitoring, user and router profiling, application and service balancing, and security protection in wireless mesh backbone networks. Practical issues and design trade-offs for implementing the proposed framework in real systems also are discussed.     

A Cross-Layer Framework for Association Control in Wireless Mesh Networks

The user association mechanism specified by the IEEE 802.11 standard does not consider the channel conditions and the AP load in the association process. Employing the mechanism in its plain form in wireless mesh networks we may only achieve low throughput and low user transmission rates. In this paper we design a new association framework in order to provide optimal association and network performance. In this framework we propose a new channel-quality based user association mechanism inspired by the operation of the infrastructure-based WLANs. Besides, we enforce our framework by proposing an airtime-metric based association mechanism that is aware of the uplink and downlink channel conditions as well as the communication load. We then extend the functionality of this mechanism in a cross-layer manner taking into account information from the routing layer, in order to fit it in the operation of wireless mesh networks. Lastly, we design a hybrid association scheme that can be efficiently applied in real deployments to improve the network performance. We evaluate the performance of our system through simulations and we show that wireless mesh networks that use the proposed association mechanisms are more capable in meeting the needs of QoS-sensitive applications.     

Hybrid QoS based routing protocol for inter and intra wireless mesh infrastructure communications

Quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks is an active area of research, which is driven by the increasing demand for real-time and multimedia applications, such as Voice over IP and Video on Demand. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS based routing protocol for wireless mesh infrastructure, called Hybrid QoS Mesh Routing (HQMR). It is composed of two QoS based routing sub-protocols: a reactive multi-metric routing protocol for intra-infrastructure communications and a proactive multi-tree based routing protocol for communications with external networks. The proposed routing protocol enables forwarding real-time and streaming applications with QoS guarantee in a mesh wireless environment, by assigning a specific routing path for each defined service class. To this end, three different QoS service classes are defined, depending on the applications requirements. We analyze in this paper the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HQMR protocol and to compare it to other routing protocols while forwarding real-time applications with QoS guarantee.     

A Cross Layer Metric for Discovering Reliable Routes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Host mobility in mobile ad hoc networks causes failure of wireless links between nodes and breaks all the routes that use these links. Consequently, route reconstructions are needed, which is one of the most critical problems for this type of wireless networks. The number of route reconstructions can be reduced if more reliable wireless links are used. Also by these links, stable clusters can be constructed as is needed in cluster based protocols. Reliable routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks use many link reliability metrics for finding these links; four of the most commonly used are ??Link Expiration Time??, ??Probabilistic Link Reliable Time??, ??Link Packet Error Rate?? and ??Link Received Signal Strength??. It is shown that these metrics enhance the reliability and reduce the number of route reconstructions, but to the best of our knowledge there is no report that compare their efficiencies. In this paper, we make this comparison in different network conditions and discuss their optimal applications. Then, a new cross layer metric is proposed that combines the aforementioned metrics according to their efficiency by means of a unit weight function. Simulation results show that by using all these metrics, the number of route reconstructions is reduced, and for the proposed one the result is better than the others.     

Graph coloring based channel assignment framework for rural wireless mesh networks

IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks with directional antennas are expected to be a new promising technology and an economic approach for providing wireless broadband services in rural areas. In this paper, we discuss interference models and address how they can affect the design of channel assignment in rural mesh networks. We present a new channel assignment framework based on graph coloring for rural wireless mesh networks. The goal of the framework is to allow synchronously transmitting or receiving data from multiple neighbor links at the same time, and continuously doing full-duplex data transfer on every link, creating an efficient rural mesh network without interference. Channel assignment is shown to be NP-hard. We frame this channel allocation problem in terms of Adjacent Vertex Distinguishing Edge Coloring （AVDEC）. Detailed assignment results on grid topology are presented and discussed. Furthermore, we design an algorithm. Finally, we evaluate the perform- ance of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations and show the algorithm is effective to the regular grid topologies, and the number of colors used by the algorithm is upper bounded by A ~ 1. Hence the algorithm guarantees that the number of channels available in standards such as IEEE 802.11a is sufficient to have a valid AVDEC for many grid topologies. We also evaluate the proposed algorithm for arbitrary graphs. The algorithm provides a lower upper bound on the minimum number of channels to the AVDEC index channel assignment problem.     

Separability and topology control of quasi unit disk graphs

A deep understanding of the structural properties of wireless networks is critical for evaluating the performance of network protocols and improving their designs. Many protocols for wireless networks—routing, topology control, information storage/retrieval and numerous other applications—have been based on the idealized unit-disk graph (UDG) network model. The significant deviation of the UDG model from many real wireless networks is substantially limiting the applicability of such protocols. A more general network model, the quasi unit-disk graph (quasi-UDG) model, captures much better the characteristics of wireless networks. However, the understanding of the properties of general quasi-UDGs has been very limited, which is impeding the designs of key network protocols and algorithms. In this paper, we present results on two important properties of quasi-UDGs: separability and the existence of power efficient spanners. Network separability is a fundamental property leading to efficient network algorithms and fast parallel computation. We prove that every quasi-UDG has a corresponding grid graph with small balanced separators that captures its connectivity properties. We also study the problem of constructing an energy-efficient backbone for a quasi-UDG. We present a distributed local algorithm that, given a quasi-UDG, constructs a nearly planar backbone with a constant stretch factor and a bounded degree. We demonstrate the excellent performance of these auxiliary graphs through simulations and show their applications in efficient routing.     

IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks: Framework and challenges

Wireless mesh networking based on 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has been actively explored for a few years. To improve the performance of WLAN mesh networks, a few new communication protocols have been developed in recent years. However, these solutions are usually proprietary and prevent WLAN mesh networks from interworking with each other. Thus, a standard becomes indispensable for WLAN mesh networks. To meet this need, an IEEE 802.11 task group, i.e., 802.11s, is specifying a standard for WLAN mesh networks. Although several standard drafts have been released by 802.11s, many issues still remain to be resolved. In order to understand what performance can be expected from the existing framework of 802.11s standard and what functionalities shall be added to 802.11s standard to improve performance, a detailed study on the existing 802.11s standard is given in this paper. The existing framework of 802.11s standard is first presented, followed by pointing out the challenging research issues that still exist in the current 802.11 standard. The purpose of this paper is to motivate other researchers to develop new scalable protocols for 802.11 wireless mesh networks.     

Routing in Large-Scale Wireless Mesh Networks Using Temperature Fields

Many wireless mesh networks are based on unicast routing protocols even though those protocols do not provide a particularly good fit for such scenarios. In this article, we report about an alternative routing paradigm, tailor-made for large multihop wireless mesh networks: field-based anycast routing. In particular, we present HEAT, a routing protocol based on this paradigm. In contrast to previous protocols, HEAT requires communication only between neighboring nodes. The underlying routing concept is a field similar to a temperature field in thermal physics. In extensive simulation experiments, we found that HEAT has excellent scalability properties due to a fully distributed implementation, and it provides much more robust routes than the unicast protocols, AODV and OLSR. As a consequence, in large-scale mobile scenarios, the packet delivery ratio with HEAT is more than two times higher, compared to AODV or OLSR. These promising results indicate that HEAT is suitable for large-scale wireless mesh networks that cover entire cities.     

SOAR: Simple Opportunistic Adaptive Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks are becoming a new attractive communication paradigm owing to their low cost and ease of deployment. Routing protocols are critical to the performance and reliability of wireless mesh networks. Traditional routing protocols send traffic along predetermined paths and face difficulties in coping with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a Simple Opportunistic Adaptive Routing protocol (SOAR) to explicitly support multiple simultaneous flows in wireless mesh networks. SOAR incorporates the following four major components to achieve high throughput and fairness: 1) adaptive forwarding path selection to leverage path diversity while minimizing duplicate transmissions, 2) priority timer-based forwarding to let only the best forwarding node forward the packet, 3) local loss recovery to efficiently detect and retransmit lost packets, and 4) adaptive rate control to determine an appropriate sending rate according to the current network conditions. We implement SOAR in both NS-2 simulation and an 18-node wireless mesh testbed. Our extensive evaluation shows that SOAR significantly outperforms traditional routing and a seminal opportunistic routing protocol, ExOR, under a wide range of scenarios.     

Design challenges for energy-constrained ad hoc wireless networks

Ad hoc wireless networks enable new and exciting applications, but also pose significant technical challenges. In this article we give a brief overview of ad hoc wireless networks and their applications with a particular emphasis on energy constraints. We then discuss advances in the link, multiple access, network, and application protocols for these networks. We show that cross-layer design of these protocols is imperative to meet emerging application requirements, particularly when energy is a limited resource.     

A Cross-Layer Optimization Framework for Multihop Multicast in Wireless Mesh Networks

The optimal and distributed provisioning of high throughput in mesh networks is known as a fundamental but hard problem. The situation is exacerbated in a wireless setting due to the interference among local wireless transmissions. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimization framework for throughput maximization in wireless mesh networks, in which the data routing problem and the wireless medium contention problem are jointly optimized for multihop multicast. We show that the throughput maximization problem can be decomposed into two subproblems: a data routing subproblem at the network layer, and a power control subproblem at the physical layer with a set of Lagrangian dual variables coordinating interlayer coupling. Various effective solutions are discussed for each subproblem. We emphasize the network coding technique for multicast routing and a game theoretic method for interference management, for which efficient and distributed solutions are derived and illustrated. Finally, we show that the proposed framework can be extended to take into account physical-layer wireless multicast in mesh networks     

Throughput-range tradeoff of wireless mesh backhaul networks

Wireless backhaul communication is expected to play a significant role in providing the necessary backhaul resources for future high-rate wireless networks. Mesh networking, in which information is routed from source to destination over multiple wireless links, has potential advantages over traditional single-hop networking, especially for backhaul communication. We develop a linear programming framework for determining optimum routing and scheduling of flows that maximizes throughput in a wireless mesh network and accounts for the effect of interference and variable-rate transmission. We then apply this framework to examine the throughput and range capabilities for providing wireless backhaul to a hexagonal grid of base stations, for both single-hop and multihop transmissions for various network scenarios. We then discuss the application of mesh networking for load balancing of wired backhaul traffic under unequal access traffic conditions. Numerical results show a significant benefit for mesh networking under unbalanced loading.