Analysis and enhancements of HELLO based link failure detection in wireless mesh networks

Link failure in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a common even, and it is the main reason for packet losses and network unreliability. Link failures must be detected quickly in order to maintain high packet delivery ratio and mitigate their bad impacts on the network performance. Link layer failure feedback approach and HELLO based link failure detection approach are the two approaches for link failures detection in WMNs. In this paper, we will investigate HELLO based link failure detection approach. We will start by mathematically analyzing this approach which is implemented in routing protocols that catch two routes. After that, we will prove that the packet delivery ratio can be increased by 1.5 by implementing two paths instead of one. In addition to that, we will propose a novel framework that dynamically assigns the values of HELLO based link failure detection approach parameters based on the communications types and the QoS requirements. Finally, we will propose a novel protocol to enhance HELLO based link failure detection approach.     

Rate-distortion based real-time wireless video streaming

This paper presents wireless video streaming techniques that exploit the characteristics of video content, transmission history, and physical layer channels to enable real-time efficient video streaming over wireless networks to a wireless client. The key contribution of the proposed video streaming techniques is the use of rate-distortion based, but simplified, low complexity packet scheduling as well as forward error correction (FEC) rate selection. To this end, we develop an optimization framework that jointly schedules the packets and selects the FEC rates. The rate-distortion optimized packet scheduling and FEC rate selection provides the optimum quality video on the receiver side albeit at a high computational cost. By some intelligent approximations, rate distortion optimized packet scheduling and FEC rate selection technique is transformed into two sub-optimal but low complexity video streaming techniques that can provide high video quality. We perform extensive simulations to understand the performance of our proposed techniques under different scenarios. Results show that, the proposed techniques improve video quality on the average by 4 dB. We conclude that significant benefits to end-user experience can be obtained by using such video streaming methods.     

Rate control for streaming video over wireless

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications for both wired and wireless networks. A widely accepted rate control method in wired networks is TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) (Floyd, 2000). It is equation-based rate control in which the TCP-friendly rate is determined as a function of packet loss rate, round-trip time, and packet size. TFRC assumes that packet loss in wired networks is primarily due to congestion, and as such is not applicable to wireless networks in which the main cause of packet loss is at the physical layer. In this article we review existing approaches to solve this problem. Then we propose multiple TFRC connections as an end-to-end rate control solution for wireless video streaming. We show that this approach not only avoids modifications to the network infrastructure or network protocol, but also results in full utilization of the wireless channel. NS-2 simulations, actual experiments over a 1/spl times/RTT CDMA wireless data network, and video streaming simulations using traces from the actual experiments are carried out to characterize the performance and show the efficiency of our proposed approach.     

Security services in group communications over wireless infrastructure, mobile ad hoc, and wireless sensor networks

Group communications in wireless networks has been facilitating many emerging applications that require packet delivery from one or more sender(s) to multiple receivers. Due to insecure wireless channels, group communications are susceptible to various kinds of attacks. Although a number of proposals have been reported to secure group communications, provisioning security in group communications in wireless networks remains a critical and challenging issue. This article presents a survey of recent advances in security requirements and services in group communications in three types of wireless networks, and discusses challenges in designing secure group communications in these networks: wireless infrastructure networks, mobile ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks.     

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.     

Adaptive video protection in large scale peer‐to‐peer video streaming over mobile wireless mesh networks

Because video streaming over mobile handheld devices has been of great interest, the necessity of introducing new methods with low implementation cost and scalable infrastructures is a strong demand of the service. In particular, these requirements are present in popular wireless networks such as wireless mesh networks (WMN). Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks promise an efficient scalable network infrastructure for video streaming over wired and wireless networks. Limited resources of the peers in P2P networks and high error rate in wireless channels make it more challenging to run P2P streaming applications over WMNs. Therefore, it is necessary to design efficient and improved error protection methods in P2P video streaming applications over WMNs. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive unequal video protection method specially intended for large scale P2P video streaming over mobile WMNs. Using this method, different frames have different priorities in receivers along the recovery process. Moreover, we precisely and completely evaluate different aspects related to frame protection in these networks using five important performance metrics including video distortion, late arrival distortion, end‐to‐end delay, overhead and initial start‐up delay. The results obtained from a precise simulation in OMNeT++ show that the proposed adaptive method significantly outperforms other solutions by providing better video quality on mobile wireless nodes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A fast and reliable routing technique for wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), real time communications (e.g., Voice over IP (VoIP) and interactive video communications) may often be interrupted as packets are frequently lost or delayed excessively. This usually happens due to the unreliability of wireless links or buffer overflows along the routing paths. The mesh connectivity within the WMN enables the capability to enhance reliability and reduce delay for such applications by using multiple paths for routing their packets. The vital components in multi‐path routing for achieving this are the pre‐determined formation of paths and the technique that the paths are deployed for packet traversal. Therefore, we propose a novel multi‐path routing protocol by introducing a new multi‐path organization and a traffic assignment technique. The designed technique dubbed as FLASH (Fast and reLiAble meSH routing protocol) discovers one primary path between a pair of source and destination based on a new proposed metric, and thereafter selects mini‐paths, which connect pairs of intermediate nodes along the primary path. The primary path and mini‐paths are concurrently deployed, as multiple copies of packets are routed through. This technique compensates for possible outage at intermediate wireless nodes or their corresponding wireless links along the primary path. Routing along mini‐paths is performed in such a way that redundant copies do not cause an excessive congestion on the network. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated analytically and through extensive simulations under various load conditions. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed multi‐path organization in terms of reliability and satisfactory achievements of the protocol in enhancing delay and throughput compared to the existing routing protocols, especially for long distances and in congested conditions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Design and implementation of multicasting for multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks

Multicasting is a useful communication method in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Many applications in WMNs require efficient and reliable multicast communications, i.e., high delivery ratio with low overhead among a group of recipients. In spite of its significance, little work has been done on providing such multicast service in multi-channel WMNs. Traditional multicast protocols for wireless and multi-hop networks tend to assume that all nodes, each of which is equipped with a single interface, collaborate on the same channel. This single-channel assumption is not always true, as WMNs often provide nodes with multiple interfaces to enhance performance. In multi-channel and multi-interface (MCMI) WMNs, the same multicast data must be sent multiple times by a sender node if its neighboring nodes operate on different channels. In this paper, we try to tackle the challenging issue of how to design a multicast protocol more suitable for MCMI WMNs. Our multicast protocol builds multicast paths while inviting multicast members, and tries to allocate the same channel to neighboring members in a bottom-up manner. By unifying fixed channels of one-hop multicast neighbors, the proposed algorithm can improve the performance such as reducing multicast data transmission overhead and delay, while managing a successful delivery ratio. In order to prove such expectation on the performance, we have implemented and evaluated the proposed solution on the real testbed having the maximum 24 nodes, each of which is equipped with two IEEE 802.11a Atheros WLAN cards.     

Optimal resource allocation for wireless video over CDMA networks

We present a multiple-channel video transmission scheme in wireless CDMA networks over multipath fading channels. We map an embedded video bitstream, which is encoded into multiple independently decodable layers by 3D-ESCOT video coding technique, to multiple CDMA channels. One video source layer is transmitted over one CDMA channel. Each video source layer is protected by a product channel code structure. A product channel code is obtained by the combination of a row code based on rate compatible punctured convolutional code (RCPC) with cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error detection and a source-channel column code, i.e., systematic rate-compatible Reed-Solomon (RS) style erasure code. For a given budget on the available bandwidth and total transmit power, the transmitter determines the optimal power allocations and the optimal transmission rates among multiple CDMA channels, as well as the optimal product channel code rate allocation, i.e., the optimal unequal Reed-Solomon code source/parity rate allocations and the optimal RCPC rate protection for each channel. In formulating such an optimization problem, we make use of results on the large-system CDMA performance for various multiuser receivers in multipath fading channels. The channel is modeled as the concatenation of wireless BER channel and a wireline packet erasure channel with a fixed packet loss probability. By solving the optimization problem, we obtain the optimal power level allocation and the optimal transmission rate allocation over multiple CDMA channels. For each CDMA channel, we also employ a fast joint source-channel coding algorithm to obtain the optimal product channel code structure. Simulation results show that the proposed framework allows the video quality to degrade gracefully as the fading worsens or the bandwidth decreases, and it offers improved video quality at the receiver.     

Joint channel assignment and routing in multiradio multichannel wireless mesh networks with directional antennas

The aggregate capacity of a wireless mesh network (WMN) is severely affected by interflow interference. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that incorporates directional antennas with multiple orthogonal channels to effectively enhance the performance of WMNs. First, a sectored connectivity graph is introduced to model multiradio multichannel WMNs with directional antennas. Next we formulate the topology design, directional interface assignment, channel allocation, and routing mathematically as a mixed integer linear programming problem. This problem is solved using an iterated local search algorithm to obtain optimized network resource allocation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture can achieve higher packet delivery ratio while providing better network fairness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Joint source-channel coding and power adaptation for energy efficient wireless video communications

We consider efficiently transmitting video over a hybrid wireless/wire-line network by optimally allocating resources across multiple protocol layers. Specifically, we present a framework of joint source-channel coding and power adaptation, where error resilient source coding, channel coding, and transmission power adaptation are jointly designed to optimize video quality given constraints on the total transmission energy and delay for each video frame. In particular, we consider the combination of two types of channel coding—inter-packet coding (at the transport layer) to provide protection against packet dropping in the wire-line network and intra-packet coding (at the link layer) to provide protection against bit errors in the wireless link. In both cases, we allow the coding rate to be adaptive to provide unequal error protection at both the packet and frame level. In addition to both types of channel coding, we also compensate for channel errors by adapting the transmission power used to send each packet. An efficient algorithm based on Lagrangian relaxation and the method of alternating variables is proposed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Simulation results are shown to illustrate the advantages of joint optimization across multiple layers.     

Analytical framework for simultaneous MAC packet transmission (SMPT) in a multicode CDMA wireless system

Stabilizing the throughput over wireless links is one of the key challenges in providing high-quality wireless multimedia services. Wireless links are typically stabilized by a combination of link-layer automatic repeat request (ARQ) mechanisms in conjunction with forward error correction and other physical layer techniques. In this paper, we focus on the ARQ component and study a novel class of ARQ mechanisms, referred to as simultaneous MAC packet transmission (SMPT). In contrast to the conventional ARQ mechanisms that transmit one packet at a time over the wireless air interface, SMPT exploits the parallel code channels provided by multicode code-division multiple access. SMPT stabilizes the wireless link by transmitting multiple packets in parallel in response to packet drops due to wireless link errors. While these parallel packet transmissions stabilize the link layer throughput, they also increase the interference level in a given cell of a cellular network or cluster of an ad hoc network. This increased interference reduces the number of traffic flows that can be simultaneously supported in a cell/cluster. We develop an analytical framework for the class of SMPT mechanisms and analyze the link-layer buffer occupancy and the code usage in a wireless system running some form of SMPT. Our analysis quantifies the tradeoff between increased link-layer quality of service and reduced number of supported flows in SMPT with good accuracy, as verified by simulations. In a typical scenario, SMPT reduces the probability of link-layer buffer overflow by over two orders of magnitude (thus enabling high-quality multimedia services, such as real-time video streaming) while supporting roughly 20% fewer flows than conventional ARQ. Our analytical framework provides a basis for resource management in wireless systems running some form of SMPT and optimizing SMPT mechanisms.     

A survey on wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. Because of their advantages over other wireless networks, WMNs are undergoing rapid progress and inspiring numerous applications. However, many technical issues still exist in this field. In order to provide a better understanding of the research challenges of WMNs, this article presents a detailed investigation of current state-of-the-art protocols and algorithms for WMNs. Open research issues in all protocol layers are also discussed, with an objective to spark new research interests in this field.     

Packet scheduling with playout adaptation for scalable video delivery over wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a playout deadline-aware packet scheduling for scalable video delivery over wireless networks. We develop a novel playout adaptation algorithm to reduce playback interruptions by jointly considering the active playout buffer status and adaptive playout rate. We also propose a packet priority analysis method based on the layer information of Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Based on the priority of the video packet and the adaptive playout-deadline, an optimal packet scheduling algorithm is proposed. Packets are selected for transmission to minimize the quality degradation caused as well as to reduce the playout latency. We also adopt a benchmark for the packet priority analysis by calculating the distortion impact of each packet with the consideration of the packet dependency in SVC. When compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms as well as the benchmark, our proposed scheduling algorithm shows a good trade-off between the video quality and the playout latency.     

Resource allocation for downlink multiuser video transmission over wireless lossy networks

Demand for multimedia services, such as video streaming over wireless networks, has grown dramatically in recent years. The downlink transmission of multiple video sequences to multiple users over a shared resource-limited wireless channel, however, is a daunting task. Among the many challenges in this area are the time-varying channel conditions, limited available resources, such as bandwidth and power, and the different transmission requirements of different video content. This work takes into account the time-varying nature of the wireless channels, as well as the importance of individual video packets, to develop a cross-layer resource allocation and packet scheduling scheme for multiuser video streaming over lossy wireless packet access networks. Assuming that accurate channel feedback is not available at the scheduler, random channel losses combined with complex error concealment at the receiver make it impossible for the scheduler to determine the actual distortion of the sequence at the receiver. Therefore, the objective of the optimization is to minimize the expected distortion of the received sequence, where the expectation is calculated at the scheduler with respect to the packet loss probability in the channel. The expected distortion is used to order the packets in the transmission queue of each user, and then gradients of the expected distortion are used to efficiently allocate resources across users. Simulations show that the proposed scheme performs significantly better than a conventional content-independent scheme for video transmission.     

An enhanced SIP proxy server for wireless VoIP in wireless mesh networks

The wireless mesh network (WMN) has emerged recently as a promising technology for next-generation wireless networking. In WMNs, it is important to provide high quality multimedia service in a flexible and intelligent manner. To address this issue in this article, we study the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for wireless voice over IP (VoIP) applications. Especially, we investigate the technical challenges in WMN VoIP systems and propose a design of an enhanced SIP proxy server to overcome them. An analysis of the signaling process and a study of simulation results have shown the advantages of our proposed approach.     

Energy-efficient wireless video coding and delivery

Transmitting video over wireless channels from mobile devices has gained increased popularity in a wide range of applications. A major obstacle in these types of applications is the limited energy supply in mobile device batteries. For this reason, efficiently utilizing energy is a critical issue in designing wireless video communication systems. This article highlights recent advances in joint source coding and optimal energy allocation. We present a general framework that takes into account multiple factors, including source coding, channel resource allocation, and error concealment, for the design of energy-efficient wireless video communication systems. This framework can take various forms and be applied to achieve the optimal trade-off between energy consumption and video delivery quality during wireless video transmission.     

Intelligent wireless mesh path selection algorithm using fuzzy decision making

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are expected to be widely deployed due to their ability to provide ubiquity, convenience, cost-efficiency, and simplicity for both service providers and end-users. Recently, the IEEE 802.11s standard introduces the hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP) which is inspired by a combination of on-demand and tree-based pro-active routing algorithms. In this paper, we argue that the proposed unimetric path selection algorithm in the standard is not reliable. We introduce and examine a novel multimetric wireless mesh path selection algorithm using fuzzy decision making under realistic wireless channel conditions. The proposed path selection algorithm is designed to improve the performance of both re-active and pro-active routing protocols of HWMP for not only single-channel but also multi-channel WMNs. The reported results show the superior performance of the proposed path selection algorithm in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio without increasing overhead significantly. Although some fuzzy-based routing algorithms have been defined in literature recently, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one to introduce and examine the use of fuzzy logic in the path selection of single- and multi-channel wireless local area network-based WMNs under realistic wireless channel conditions.     

Link quality estimation for arbitrary packet sizes over wireless links using packet reception events

The packet error rate of wireless links is known to increase with the length of packets. Yet, packet length is rarely taken into account in protocols and algorithms estimating the packet error rate. Still, it is an important factor that higher layer protocols need to be aware of. In this article, we systematically measure the relationship between packet length and packet error rate over a wide range of wireless links and technologies. On the basis of our measurements, we propose a simple empirical model that can capture this behavior. Using this model, multiple methods are proposed that can estimate the packet error rate for any packet length by sampling the link. We consider methods based on hello packets with controlled packet lengths as well as data packets, where the transmitted packet lengths cannot be controlled. We investigate the accuracy of the different estimation methods in various situations and show how they are able to predict the delivery ratio for different packet sizes.     

Cluster‐based mobility management algorithms for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been the recent advancements and attracting more academicians and industrialists for their seamless connectivity to the internet. Radio resource is one among the prime resources in wireless networks, which is expected to use in an efficient way especially when the mobile nodes are on move. However, providing guaranteed quality of service to the mobile nodes in the network is a challenging issue. To accomplish this, we propose 2 clustering algorithms, namely, static clustering algorithm for WMNs and dynamic clustering algorithm for WMNs. In these algorithms, we propose a new weight‐based cluster head and cluster member selection process for the formation of clusters. The weight of the nodes in WMN is computed considering the parameters include the bandwidth of the node, the degree of node connectivity, and node cooperation factor. Further, we also propose enhanced quality of service enabled routing protocol for WMNs considering the delay, bandwidth, hopcount, and expected transmission count are the routing metrics. The performance of the proposed clustering algorithms and routing protocol are analyzed, and results show high throughput, high packet delivery ratio, and low communication cost compared with the existing baseline mobility management algorithms and routing protocols.