DTN routing using explicit and probabilistic routing table states

Routing in communication networks involves the indirection from a persistent name (ID) to a locator. The locator specifies how packets are delivered to a destination with a particular ID. Such a mapping is provided by a routing table entry, i.e. state. In a DTN, it is hard to maintain routing state because intermittent connectivity prevents protocols from refreshing states when they become inaccurate. In prior work, per-destination state mostly corresponds to utilities, where a high utility value about a destination implies that the probability to encounter the destination for the node maintaining the state is high. This approach depends on a particular mobility pattern in which nodes that met frequently in the past are likely to encounter in the future. In this paper, we use the concept of weak state that does not rely on external messages to remain valid (Acer et al. in MobiCom ’07: proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on mobile computing and networking, pp 290–301, 2007). Our weak state realization provides probabilistic yet explicit information about where the destination is located. We build Weak State Routing protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks (WSR-D) that exploits the direction of node mobility in forwarding. It provides an osmosis mechanism to disseminate the state information to the network. With osmosis, a node has consistent information about a portion of the nodes that are located in regions relevant to its direction of mobility. Through simulations, we show that WSR-D achieves a higher delivery ratio with smaller average delay, and reduces the number of message transfers in comparison to Spray & Wait (Spyropoulos et al. in Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2005 workshops: conference on computer communications, pp 252–259, 2005) and Spray & Focus (Spyropoulos et al. in IEEE/ACM Trans Netw, 16(1):77–90, 2008), a stateless and a utility based protocol, respectively.     

Energy-Aware Data Aggregation for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with a Mobile Sink

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of many small and highly sensitive nodes that have the ability to react quickly. In WSNs, sink mobility brings new challenges to large-scale sensor networks. Almost all of the energy-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for WSNs aim at optimizing network performance while relaying data to a stationary gateway (sink). However, through such contemporary protocols, mobility of the sink can make established routes unstable and non-optimal. The use of mobile sinks introduces a trade-off between the need for frequent rerouting to ensure optimal network operation and the desire to minimize the overhead of topology management. In this paper, in order to reduce energy consumption and minimize the overhead of rerouting frequency, we propose an energy-aware data aggregation scheme (EADA) for grid-based wireless sensor networks with a mobile sink. In the proposed scheme, each sensor node with location information and limited energy is considered. Our approach utilizes location information and selects a special gateway in each area of a grid responsible for forwarding messages. We restrict the flooding region to decrease the overhead for route decision by utilizing local information. We conducted simulations to show that the proposed routing scheme outperforms the coordination-based data dissemination scheme (CODE) (Xuan, H. L., & Lee, S. Proceedings of the Sensor Networks and Information Processing Conference, pp. 13–18, 2004).     

Load-balancing routing in multichannel hybrid wireless networks with single network interface

A hybrid wireless network is an extension of an infrastructure network, where a mobile host may connect to an access point (AP) using multihop wireless routes, via other mobile hosts. The APs are configured to operate on one of multiple available channels. Mobile hosts and wireless routers can select its operating channel dynamically through channel switching. In this environment, a routing protocol that finds routes to balance load among channels while maintaining connectivity was proposed. The protocol works with nodes equipped with a single network interface, which distinguishes the work with other multichannel routing protocols that require multiple interfaces per node. The protocol discovers multiple routes to multiple APs, possibly operating on different channels. Based on a traffic load information, each node selects the "best" route to an AP and synchronizes its channel with the AP. With this behavior, the channel load is balanced, removing hot spots and improving channel utilization. The protocol assures every node has at least one route to an AP, where all intermediate nodes are operating on the same channel. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol successfully adapts to changing traffic conditions and improves performance over a single-channel protocol and a multichannel protocol with no load balancing.     

Link failure resilience in the dynamic source routing protocol

Reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks reduce the routing cost in high mobility environments where link failures are frequent. However, route discovery in these protocols is typically performed via network‐wide flooding, which consumes a substantial amount of bandwidth and causes a significant latency to data packets. To improve the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol and overcome these limitations, we propose two optimization techniques, viz. generalized salvaging mechanism and cache maintenance using a distributed topology discovery mechanism through mobile ant‐agents. We show, by simulations, that our contributions improve the DSR performance, and particularly in large scale networks with high mobility and heavy load that cause frequent link failures. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MERIT: A Scalable Approach for Protocol Assessment

MERIT is a framework that can be used to assess routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (manets). It uses the novel concept of a shortest mobile path (SMP) in a mobile graph, a generalization of the shortest path problem for mobile environments. As a measure for routing protocol assessment, we propose the mean ratio of the cost of the route used by a protocol to the cost of the optimal mobile path for the same network history. The cost reflects that the route used in a session can change over time because of network dynamics such as topology changes. The aim is for the ratio to be an abstract, inherent measure of the protocol that is as implementation-independent as possible. The MERIT spectrum, which is the ratio expressed as the function of some parameters of interest, is a characterization of protocol effectiveness. MERIT, for MEan Real vs. Ideal cosT, provides a scalable assessment framework: rather than comparing performance measures of different protocols directly, we compare a protocol to the optimal solution. That is, rather than forcing the comparison to be in the same system, it is done once for each protocol in its own environment. Furthermore, we show that there is an efficient algorithm to solve the underlying SMP problem for important cases, making the approach practically feasible. We also investigate generalizations of and extensions within the MERIT framework. We show that the MERIT framework is rich, with much wider generality and potential applicability than assessing routing protocols.     

A Power-Aware Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks With Mobility Prediction

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network that does not have a fixed infrastructure. Due to the high mobility of nodes, the network topology of MANETs changes very fast, making it more difficult to find the routes that message packets use. Because mobile nodes have limited battery power, it is therefore very important to use energy in a MANET efficiently. In this paper, we propose a power-aware multicast routing protocol (PMRP) with mobility prediction for MANETs. In order to select a subset of paths that provide increased stability and reliability of routes, in routing discovery, each node receives the RREQ packet and uses the power-aware metric to get in advance the power consumption of transmitted data packets. If the node has enough remaining power to transmit data packets, it uses the global positioning system (GPS) to get the location information (i.e., position, velocity and direction) of the mobile nodes and utilizes this information to calculate the link expiration time (LET) between two connected mobile nodes. During route discovery, each destination node selects the routing path with the smallest LET and uses this smallest link expiration time as the route expiration time (RET). Each destination node collects several feasible routes and then selects the path with the longest RET value as the primary routing path. Then the source node uses these routes between the source node and each destination node to create a multicast tree. In the multicast tree, the source node will be the root node and the destination nodes will be the leaf nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed PMRP outperforms MAODV (Royer, E. M. & Perkins, C. E. (1999). In Proceedings of the ACM MOBICOM, pp. 207–218, August 1999.) and RMAODV (Baolin, S. & Layuan, L. (2005). In Proceeding of the 2005 IEEE International symposium on microwave antenna, propagation and EMC technologies for wireless communications, Vol. 2, pp. 1514–1517, August 2005.).     

A study of a routing attack in OLSR‐based mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes which are able to communicate with each other without relying on predefined infrastructures or central administration. Due to their flexibilities and easy deployment, MANET can be applied in situation where network infrastructures are not available. However, due to their unique characteristics such as open medium and the lack of central administration, they are much more vulnerable to malicious attacks than a conventional infrastructured wireless network. MANET employs routing to provide connectivity for mobile nodes that are not within direct wireless transmission range. Existing routing protocols in MANET assume a trusted and cooperative environment. However, in hostile environment, mobile nodes are susceptible to various kinds of routing attacks. In this paper, we show that an OLSR MANET node is prone to be isolated by malicious attack called Node Isolation attack. After analysing the attack in detail, we present a technique to mitigate the impact of the attack and improve the performance of the network when the attack is launched. The results of our implementations illustrate that the proposed solution can mitigate the attack efficiently. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deploying power‐aware on‐demand (PAOD) schemes over routing protocols of mobile wireless ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous collection of mobile nodes that communicate over relatively bandwidth‐constrained wireless links. MANETs need efficient algorithms to determine network connectivity, link scheduling, and routing. An important issue in network routing for MANETs is to conserve power while still achieve a high packet success rate. Traditional MANET routing protocols do not count for such concern. They all assume working with unlimited power reservoirs. Several ideas have been proposed for adding power‐awareness capabilities to ad hoc networks. Most of these proposals tackle the issue by either proposing new power‐aware routing protocols or modifying existing routing protocols through the deployment of power information as cost functions. None of them deal with counter‐measures that ought to be taken when nodes suffer from low power reserves and are subject to shut down in mid of normal network operations. In this paper, power‐awareness is added to a well‐known traditional routing protocol, the ad hoc on‐demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. The original algorithm is modified to deal with situations in which nodes experience low power reserves. Two schemes are proposed and compared with the original protocol using different performance metrics such as average end‐to‐end delays, transmission success rates, and throughputs. These schemes provide capabilities for AODV to deal with situations in which operating nodes have almost consumed their power reserves. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RandomCast: An Energy-Efficient Communication Scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), every node overhears every data transmission occurring in its vicinity and thus, consumes energy unnecessarily. However, since some MANET routing protocols such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) collect route information via overhearing, they would suffer if they are used in combination with 802.11 PSM. Allowing no overhearing may critically deteriorate the performance of the underlying routing protocol, while unconditional overhearing may offset the advantage of using PSM. This paper proposes a new communication mechanism, called RandomCast, via which a sender can specify the desired level of overhearing, making a prudent balance between energy and routing performance. In addition, it reduces redundant rebroadcasts for a broadcast packet, and thus, saves more energy. Extensive simulation using ns-2 shows that RandomCast is highly energy-efficient compared to conventional 802.11 as well as 802.11 PSM-based schemes, in terms of total energy consumption, energy goodput, and energy balance.     

Exploring the performance of TCP vegas in mobile ad hoc networks

Recent research efforts in mobile ad hoc networks have concentrated on examining the behaviour of TCP Reno over various ad hoc routing protocols and have suggested a number of extensions to improve its performance. TCP Vegas, which takes a proactive approach to congestion avoidance, has not so far been examined as a viable alternative to TCP Reno in wireless environments and no effort has been made to analyse its performance over routing protocols for MANETs. This paper evaluates using extensive simulation experiments the performance behaviour of TCP Vegas over a proactive (destination sequenced distance vector) and two reactive (dynamic source routing and ad hoc on demand distance vector) routing protocols and compares it against that of TCP Reno. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multi‐interface cognitive radio for enhanced routing in multi‐hop cellular networks

Multi‐hop cellular network (MCN) is a wireless communication architecture that combines the benefits of conventional single‐hop cellular networks and multi‐hop ad hoc relaying networks. The route selection in MCN depends on the availability of intermediate nodes and their neighborhood connectivity. Cognitive radio (CR) is an emerging communication paradigm that exploits the available radio frequencies opportunistically for the effective utilization of the radio frequency spectrum. The incorporation of CR and mobile ad hoc network routing protocols in MCN could potentially improve the spectrum utilization and the routing performance of MCN. This paper firstly presents the proposed model for the multi‐interface CR mobile node with transceiver synchronization and then investigates its opportunistic spectrum utilization and routing performance in MCN. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integrated Routing and Storage for Messaging Applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper is motivated by the observation that traditional ad hoc routing protocols are not an adequate solution for messaging applications (e.g., e-mail) in mobile ad hoc networks. Routing in ad hoc mobile networks is challenging mainly because of node mobility – the more rapid the rate of movement, the greater the fraction of bad routes and undelivered messages. For applications that can tolerate delays beyond conventional forwarding delays, we advocate a relay-based approach to be used in conjunction with traditional ad hoc routing protocols. This approach takes advantage of node mobility to disseminate messages to mobile nodes. The result is the Mobile Relay Protocol (MRP), which integrates message routing and storage in the network; the basic idea is that if a route to a destination is unavailable, a node performs a controlled local broadcast (a relay) to its immediate neighbors. In a network with sufficient mobility – precisely the situation when conventional routes are likely to be non-existent or broken – it is quite likely that one of the relay nodes to which the packet has been relayed will encounter a node that has a valid, short (conventional) route to the eventual destination, thereby increasing the likelihood that the message will be successfully delivered. Our simulation results under a variety of node movement models demonstrate that this idea can work well for applications that prefer reliability over latency.     

NARD: Neighbor-assisted route discovery in MANETs

Reactive routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks usually discover routes by disseminating control packets across the entire network; this technique is known as brute-force flooding. This paper presents NARD, which stands for neighbor-assisted route discovery protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. In NARD, a source node floods a limited portion of the network searching not only for the destination node, but also for routing information related to other nodes (called destination-neighbors) that were near the destination node recently. Destination-neighbors can be used as anchor points where a second limited flooding takes place in search for the destination node. Because only two limited portions of the network are flooded by control packets near the source and destination nodes, NARD can significantly reduce signaling overhead due to route-discovery compared with other proposals. Simulations with NS-2 were carried out to verify the validity of our approach.     

Bypass routing: An on-demand local recovery protocol for ad hoc networks

On-demand routing protocols for ad hoc networks reduce the cost of routing in high mobility environments. However, route discovery in on-demand routing is typically performed via network-wide flooding, which consumes a substantial amount of bandwidth. In this paper, we present bypass routing, a local recovery protocol that aims to reduce the frequency of route request floods triggered by broken routes. Specifically, when a broken link is detected, a node patches the affected route using local information, which is acquired on-demand, and thereby bypasses the broken link. We implemented SLR (Source Routing with Local Recovery) as a prototype of our approach. Simulation studies show that SLR achieves efficient and effective local recovery while maintaining acceptable overhead.     

Efficient Color-theory-based Dynamic Localization for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Location information is critical to mobile wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications. With the help of location information, for example, routing can be performed more efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel localization approach, Color-theory based Dynamic Localization (CDL), which is based on color theory to exploit localization in mobile WSNs. CDL makes use of the broadcast information, such as locations and RGB values, from all anchors (a small portion of nodes with GPS receivers attached), to help the server to create a location database and assist each sensor node to compute its RGB value. Then, the RGB values of all sensor nodes are sent to the server for localization of the sensor nodes. A unique feature of our color-theory based mechanism is that it can use one color to represent the distances of a sensor node to all anchors. Since CDL is easy to implement and is a centralized approach, it is very suitable for applications that need a centralized server to collect user (sensor) data and monitor user activities, such as community health-care systems and hospital monitoring systems. Evaluation results have shown that for mobile WSNs, the location accuracy of CDL (E-CDL, an enhanced version of CDL) is 40–50% (75–80%) better than that of MCL (Hu, L., & Evans, D. (2004). Localization for mobile sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on mobile computing and networking, pp. 45–57). In addition, we have implemented and validated our E-CDL algorithm on the MICAz Mote Developer’s Kit.     

Avoiding Counting to Infinity in Distance Vector Routing

The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) may introduce misleading routing information into the routing table, due to network topology changes such as link or router failures. This is known as the counting to infinity problem. In the past, the distance metric had to be below 16 hops in order to keep this counting within reasonable limits. In this paper a more elaborate approach is presented in order to recognize those router interfaces which might have received misleading routing messages. This is accomplished by evaluating routing updates more carefully than is done by the well known split horizon approach. This new approach gets by without any additional message exchange between the RIP-protocol partners. In contrast to other approaches, the router interfaces are examined in pairs to determine if a loop exists between them. The algorithm locally extracts all the information it needs from the normal update messages that are exchanged between RIP neighbors and is thus executed in constant time. Only some minor calculations have to be carried out to gain the knowledge that is necessary to recognize those interfaces which may have received misleading routing information. Hence, this new distance vector routing without counting to infinity can be used in complex networking environments.     

Adaptive zone routing protocol for ad hoc network nodes with non‐uniform mobilities

In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless NETworks (MANETs) have been developed. Performance evaluation and comparison of many of these routing protocols have been performed using detailed simulation models. Zone routing protocol (ZRP) is one of these routing protocols, which is a hybrid routing protocol that proactively maintains routing information for a local neighbourhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. The studies on ZRP have assumed homogeneous scenarios where all mobile nodes have uniform mobility and are statistically identical, lacking the studies on heterogeneous scenarios where mobile nodes move with non‐uniform mobilities in the same network. In this paper, we study the performance of ZRP in such scenarios. We propose an efficient scheme for ZRP to adapt to the non‐uniform mobilities scenario and study its performance for different mobility scenarios, network loads and network sizes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Safari: A self-organizing, hierarchical architecture for scalable ad hoc networking

As wireless devices become more pervasive, mobile ad hoc networks are gaining importance, motivating the development of highly scalable ad hoc networking techniques. In this paper, we give an overview of the Safari architecture for highly scalable ad hoc network routing, and we present the design and evaluation of a specific realization of the Safari architecture, which we call Masai. We focus in this work on the scalability of learning and maintaining the routing state necessary for a large ad hoc network. The Safari architecture provides scalable ad hoc network routing, the seamless integration of infrastructure networks when and where they are available, and the support of self-organizing, decentralized network applications. Safari’s architecture is based on (1) a self-organizing network hierarchy that recursively groups participating nodes into an adaptive, locality-based hierarchy of cells; (2) a routing protocol that uses a hybrid of proactive and reactive routing information in the cells and scales to much larger numbers of nodes than previous ad hoc network routing protocols; and (3) a distributed hash table grounded in the network hierarchy, which supports decentralized network services on top of Safari. We evaluate the Masai realization of the Safari architecture through analysis and simulations, under varying network sizes, fraction of mobile nodes, and offered traffic loads. Compared to both the DSR and the L+ routing protocols, our results show that the Masai realization of the Safari architecture is significantly more scalable, with much higher packet delivery ratio and lower overhead.     

Performance of a MANET directional MAC protocol with angle‐of‐arrival estimation

The use of directional antennas in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has shown to offer large throughput gains relative to omnidirectional antennas. When used in ad hoc networks, directional medium‐access‐control (DMAC) protocols usually require all nodes, or part of nodes, to be aware of their exact locations. This location information is typically provided using a global positioning system (GPS). Although GPS systems are designed to be as nearly accurate as possible, there are still estimation errors that can cause a relatively large deviation from the actual GPS receiver position. In this paper, we investigate the effect of inaccurate node position estimation on the throughput of these protocols. Our results clearly indicate that the advantages of DMAC protocols diminish if the available position information is not accurate enough. As an alternative, we propose an efficient DMAC protocol that utilizes signal parameter estimation via the rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) for direction‐of‐arrival (DOA) estimation; alleviating the need for GPS and, hence, avoiding the degrading associated with typical GPS position estimation errors. Moreover, unlike GPS‐based protocols, our protocol is suitable for both outdoor and indoor applications. Under different operating conditions and channel models, our simulation results show the throughput improvement achieved using the proposed protocol relative to the IEEE 802.11. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GeoSVR: A map-based stateless VANET routing

Compared with traditional routing techniques, geographic routing has been proven to be more suitable for highly mobile environments like Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) because of enhanced scalability and feasibility. These routings use greedy modes or forwarding paths to forward packets. However, the dynamic nature of vehicular network such as frequently changed topology, vehicles density and radio obstacles, could create local maximum, sparse connectivity and network partitions. We propose GeoSVR, a geographic stateless routing combined with node location and digital map. The proposed GeoSVR scheme enhances forwarding path to solve local maximum and sparse connectivity problem, and the proposed restricted forwarding algorithm overcomes unreliable wireless channel issues. In our study, simulations and real world experiments were conducted to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed solution. Our results show GeoSVR can provide higher packet delivery ratio with comparable latency to other geographic routing schemes.