Time and power scheduling in an ad hoc network with bidirectional relaying and network coding

Network coding (NC) is a technique that allows intermediate nodes to combine the received packets from multiple links and forwarded to subsequent nodes. Compared with pure relaying, using NC in a wireless network, one can potentially improve the network throughput, but it increases the complexity of resource allocations as the quality of one transmission is often affected by the transmission conditions of multiple links. In this paper, we consider an ad hoc network, where all the links have bidirectional communications, and a relay node forwards traffic between the source and the destination nodes using NC. All transmissions share the same frequency channel, and simultaneous transmissions cause interference to each other. We consider both digital NC and analog NC strategies, referred to as DNC and ANC, respectively, and schedule transmission time and power of the nodes in order to maximize the overall network throughput. For DNC, an optimum scheduling is formulated and solved by assuming that a central controller is available to collect all the link gain information and make the scheduling decisions. Distributed scheduling schemes are proposed for networks using DNC and ANC. Our results indicate that the proposed scheduling scheme for DNC achieves higher throughput than pure relaying, and the scheduling scheme for ANC can achieve higher throughput than both DNC and pure relaying under certain conditions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maximizing the Network Stability in Mobile WiMAX Mesh Networks

Resource scheduling and routing tree construction in WiMAX mesh centralized scheduling are not defined in the standard and thus are subject to extensive research. In this paper, we consider routing and scheduling in a WiMAX-based mesh network. We assume that nodes are not necessarily stationary, but rather mobile with a mobility that may yield to frequent topology changes (e.g., failure of existing links and creation of new transmission links). We model the joint routing and scheduling as an optimization problem whose objective is either to determine a minimum length schedule by maximizing spectrum spatial reuse or maximizing the network lifetime by routing around the less stable RF-links, while satisfying a set of (uplink/downlink) end-to-end demands. While solving the problem with the two objectives, we study the tradeoffs between these two objectives. We show that minimizing the schedule length forces the joint routing and scheduling problem to generate a routing tree and feasible transmission groups which favor higher spectrum spatial reuse (and hence higher system throughput), irrespective of the robustness of the selected transmission links. In addition, we show that maximizing the network stability or lifetime yields the selection of different routing trees and slot assignments which do not necessarily result in shorter schedule length. We perform numerical experiences where we compare the performances of our proposed models with respect to the network stability and resource spatial reuse.     

Power-efficient and interference-free link scheduling algorithms for connected wireless sensor networks

A fundamental aspect in performance engineering of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is optimizing the set of links that can be concurrently activated to meet a given signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold. The solution of this combinatorial problem is a key element in wireless link scheduling. Another key architectural goal in WSN is connectivity. The connectivity of sensor nodes is critical for WSN, as connected graphs can be used for both data collection and data dissemination. In this paper, we investigate the joint scheduling and connectivity problem in WSN assuming the SINR model. We propose algorithms to build connected communication graphs with power-efficient links to be scheduled simultaneously in one time slot. The algorithms aiming at minimizing the number of time slots needed to successfully schedule all the given links such that the nodes can communicate without interference in the SINR model. While power-efficient and interference-free schedules reduce energy consumption, minimization of the schedule length (shortest link scheduling) has the effect of maximizing network throughput. We propose one greedy randomized constructive heuristic, two local search procedures, and three greedy randomized adaptive search procedures metaheuristics. We report computational experiments comparing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Our simulation also shows the trade-off between power consumption and schedule length and the results indicate that not only the overall performance of our algorithms, but also show that the total power and schedule length value of its solutions are better than the existing work.

     

Optimal Modernization Policies for Telecommunications Facilities

This paper considers a problem of telecommunications network modernization. The model presented provides the cost criterion corresponding to a general network evolution strategy which may consist of a combination of three basic policies: expansion of existing facilities; overlay of existing facilities with modern equipment to serve the growth; or replacement of existing facilities with modern equipment. The cost criterion is basically defined as the cumulated sum of all inflated discounted cash flows. Two major problems are discussed: 1) the single location or local facility evolution problem applicable to single transmission links or switching nodes and 2) the multilocation problem involving several nodes. An application of the second problem described here concerns the selection of switching equipment types for a telephony network (including remote concentrators). For both problems, simple necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for pure strategies to be optimal. Pure strategies involve events occurring at the beginning and/or end of the study horizon.     

Scheduling links with air-time in multi transmit/receive wireless mesh networks

A key advance in enabling higher wireless mesh network capacity is allowing routers to transmit or receive (MTR) from multiple neighbors simultaneously over the same frequency. Achieving this capacity, however, is predicated on a link scheduler that is able to capitalize on the MTR capability of nodes to activate the maximum number of active links, and also to derive the shortest schedule that ensures all links are activated at least once. To date, existing schedulers do not consider the transmission or air-time of packet(s). Henceforth, this paper fills this gap and propose to derive the shortest superframe length, defined as the end time of the last transmitting link. Our scheduler, called A-TxRx, greedily adds links whenever a link finishes its transmission. As a result, unlike previous schedulers, links can start transmitting/receiving as soon as there is no conflict. We have evaluated the performance of A-TxRx in various network configurations, and compared it against two state-of-the-art approaches: 2P and JazzyMAC. The results show A-TxRx outperforming these algorithms significantly, especially when the network becomes denser. Specifically, the superframe length of A-TxRx is typically less than half of 2P and JazzyMAC, with 60 % more concurrently transmitting links.     

Lifetime maximization for multicasting in energy-constrained wireless networks

We consider the problem of maximizing the lifetime of a given multicast connection in a wireless network of energy-constrained (e.g., battery-operated) nodes, by choosing ideal transmission power levels for the nodes relaying the connection. We distinguish between two basic operating modes: In a static power assignment, the power levels of the nodes are set at the beginning and remain unchanged until the nodes are depleted of energy. In a dynamic power schedule, the powers can be adjusted during operation. We show that while lifetime-maximizing static power assignments can be found in polynomial time, for dynamic schedules the problem becomes NP-hard. We introduce two approximation heuristics for the dynamic case, and experimentally verify that the lifetime of a dynamically adjusted multicast connection can be made several times longer than what can be achieved by the best possible static assignment.     

Partner selection strategies in cooperative wireless networks with optimal power distribution

There have been several results that illustrate the best performance that a network can get through cooperation of relay nodes. For practical purposes, not all nodes in the network should be involved at the same time in every transmission. Therefore, optimal partner selection protocols in cooperative wireless networks are believed to be the first important thing that should be paid attention to. This problem in our article is considered in the context of regenerative nodes and non-altruistic cooperation （no pure relay exists; all nodes have their own data to transmit）. For each transmission, the protocol must provide the user （source node） a ＇best partner＇ （relay node） to cooperate with （for network simplicity and less transmission signals here, assume that each user has only one cooperative node）. A criterion is essentially needed when defining what a ＇best partner＇ is; in this article, two factors, i.e, the successful transmission probability and the transmission power, are considered. Three optimal partner selection strategies with different goals are proposed and analyzed respectively. The simulation results show that these are all supposed to be good tradeoffs between power consumption and transmission performance.     

Joint data rate and power allocation for lifetime maximization in interference limited ad hoc networks

In this paper, we consider the following problem in the wireless ad hoc network: Given a set of paths between source and destination, how to divide the data flow among the paths and how to control the transmission rates, times, and powers of the individual links in order to maximize the operation time of the worst network node. If all nodes are of equal importance, the operation time of the worst node is also the lifetime of the network. By solving the problem, our aim is to investigate how the network lifetime is affected by link conditions such as the maximum transmission power of a node and the peak data rate of a link. For the purpose, we start from a system model that incorporates the carrier to interference ratio (CIR) into a variable data rate of a link. With this, we can develop an iterative algorithm for the lifetime maximization, which resembles to the distributed power control in cellular systems. Numerical examples on the iterative algorithm are included to illustrate the network lifetime as a function of the maximum transmission power and the peak data rate.     

Deterministic collision free communication despite continuous motion

We present a deterministic solution for nodes in a mobile wireless ad hoc network to communicate reliably and maintain local neighborhood information. The nodes are located on a two-dimensional plane and may be in continuous motion. In our solution we tile the plane with hexagons. Each hexagon is assigned a color from a finite set of colors. Two hexagons of the same color are located sufficiently far apart so that nodes in these two hexagons cannot interfere with each other’s broadcasts. Based on this partitioning we develop a periodic deterministic schedule for mobile nodes to broadcast. This schedule guarantees collision avoidance. Broadcast slots are tied to geographic locations instead of nodes and the schedule for a node changes dynamically as it moves from tile to tile. The schedule allows nodes to maintain information about their local neighborhood. This information in turn is used to keep the schedule collision-free. We demonstrate the correctness of our algorithm, and discuss how the periodic schedule can be adapted for different scenarios. The periodic schedule, however, does not address the problem of initial neighbor discovery at start-up. We give a separate algorithm for this problem of initially discovering nodes present within communication range at start-up.     

Deadline-aware scheduling of cooperative relayers in TDMA-based wireless industrial networks

In this paper we consider a scenario in which a set of source nodes wishes to transmit real-time data packets periodically to a central controller over lossy wireless links, while using a TDMA-based medium access control protocol. Furthermore, a number of relay nodes are present which can help the source nodes with packet retransmissions. The key question we consider in this paper is how to schedule the TDMA slots for retransmissions while taking advantage of the relay nodes, so that the average number of packets missing their deadlines is minimized. We provide a problem formulation for the general deadline-aware TDMA relay scheduling problem. Since the design space of the general problem is large, we also present one particular class of restricted TDMA relay scheduling problems. We suggest and numerically investigate a range of algorithms and heuristics, both optimal and suboptimal, of the restricted scheduling problem, which represent different trade-offs between achievable performance and computational complexity. Specifically, we introduce two different Markov Decision Process (MDP) based formulations for schedule computation of the restricted TDMA relay scheduling problem. One MDP formulation gives an optimal schedule, another (approximate) formulation gives a sub-optimal schedule which, however, comes very close to the optimal performance at much more modest computational and memory costs.     

Topology control for multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks using directional antennas

Directional antennas are widely used technologies for reducing signal interference and increasing spatial reuse. In this paper, we propose a topology control method for multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks that use directional antennas. We are given a set of mesh routers installed in a region and some of them are gateway nodes that are connected to the Internet via wired lines. Each router has a traffic demand (Internet access traffic) generated from the end-users. The problem is how to adjust antenna orientations of radios and assign channels to them to construct a logical network topology, such that the minimum delivery ratio of traffic demands of routers is maximized. We first formulate the problem to an equivalent optimization problem with a clearer measurable metric, which is to minimize the largest interfering traffic of links in the network. We then propose a three-step solution to solve the problem. Firstly, we construct a set of routing trees, with the objective to balance the traffic among tree links. Secondly, we assign the radios of a node to the links it needs to serve, such that the total traffic load of the links that each radio serves is as balanced as possible. Thirdly, we do a fine-grained adjustment of antenna orientations and assign channels to them, such that the transmission area of each antenna will cover all the links it serves and the largest interfering traffic of links is minimized.     

Budget management of network capacity planning by searchingconstrained range and dominant set

A communication network's reliability, survivability, and interconnectivity are primarily based on the degree of interconnection between the existing nodes of the network. Enhancement of these characteristics can be obtained by adding direct communication links between nodes of the network. This process is generally subject to a budget constraint. From the service provider's perspective, enhancing the interconnectivity of heterogeneous networks is part of operations evolution. However, the interconnectivity or link enhancement problem, for a given budget, is NP-complete. Decisions by considering multiple criteria improve previous work and may search only the constrained range. The constrained range is determined by a dominant set of multiple criteria. A review of pertinent previous work, problem formulation, algorithm presentation, and discussion of improving the computation time with compromising the optimality by using the multiple-criteria constrained range are also provided     

面向混合业务的无线传感器网络能量有效接入策略

研究了在实时业务和非实时业务同时存在的混合背景下,非实时业务的无线传感器节点自适应侦听和睡眠的动态接入机制。网络节点处于睡眠状态时所需的能量很低,节约了无线传感器网络节点的平均能量消耗;但是,过长的睡眠时间可能使得网络节点错失传输机会。因此,根据信道的使用情况,合理地设定无线传感器网络节点的睡眠时间,能够在网络能量消耗和传输效率之间进行调整,从而最大化无线传感器网络的能量传输效率。首先,利用连续时间 Markov 方法对问题进行建模,并利用基于摄动分析理论对系统模型进行分析,获得求解无线传感器网络能量效率最大化的最优睡眠时间梯度算法。最后通过理论结果和计算机仿真模拟的对比,验证了推荐方法的可行性。     

Transmission scheduling in a multi‐channel wireless network with bidirectional relaying links

Using network coding in a wireless network can potentially improve the network throughput. On the other hand, it increases the complexity of resource allocations as the quality of one transmission is affected by the link conditions of the transmitter to multiple receivers. In this work, we study time slot scheduling and channel allocations jointly for a network with bidirectional relaying links, where the two end nodes of each link can exchange data through a relay node. Two scenarios are considered when the relay node forwards packets to the end nodes. In the first scenario, the relay node always forwards network‐coded packets to both end nodes simultaneously; in the second scenario, the relay node opportunistically uses network coding for two‐way relaying and traditional one‐way relaying. For each scenario, an optimization problem is first formulated for maximizing the total network throughput. The optimum scheduling is not causal because it requires future information of channel conditions. We then propose heuristic scheduling schemes. The slot‐based scheduling maximizes the total transmission rate of all the nodes at each time slot, and the node‐based scheduling schedules transmissions based on achievable transmission rates of individual nodes at different channels. The node‐based one has lower complexity than the slot‐based one. Our results indicate that although the node‐based scheduling achieves slightly lower throughput than the slot‐based one, both the proposed scheduling schemes are very effective in the sense that the difference between their throughput and the optimum scheduling is relatively small in different network settings. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Random Mobility and Heterogeneity-Aware Hybrid Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Network

Random mobility of a node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) causes the frequent changes in the network dynamics with increased cost in terms of energy and bandwidth. During data collections and transmission, they need the additional efforts to synchronize and schedule the activities of nodes. A key challenge is to maintain the global clock scale for synchronization of nodes at different levels to minimize the energy consumption and clock skew. It is also difficult to schedule the activities for effective utilization of slots allocated for aggregated data transmission. The paper proposes the Random Mobility and Heterogeneity-aware Hybrid Synchronization Algorithm (MHS) for WSN. The proposed algorithm uses the cluster-tree for efficient synchronization of CH and nodes in the cluster and network, level-by-level. The network consists of three nodes with random mobility and are heterogeneous regarding energy with static sink. All the nodes and CH are synchronized with the notion of the global timescale provided by the sink as a root node. With the random mobility of the node, the network structure frequently changes causing an increase in energy consumption. To mitigate this problem, MHS aggregate data with the notion of a global timescale throughout the network. Also, the hierarchical structure along with pair-wise synchronization reduces the clock skews hence energy consumption. In the second phase of MHS, the aggregated data packets are passed through the scheduled and synchronized slots using TDMA as basic MAC layer protocol to reduce the collision of packets. The results are extended by using the hybrid approach of scheduling and synchronization algorithm on the base protocol. The comparative results show that MHS is energy and bandwidth efficient, with increased throughput and reduced delay as compared with state-of-the-art solutions.     

A scalable joint routing and scheduling scheme for large-scale wireless sensor networks

The multihop configuration of a large-scale wireless sensor network enables multiple simultaneous transmissions without interference within the network. Existing time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling schemes exploit gain based on the assumption that the path is optimally determined by a routing protocol. In contrast, our scheme jointly considers routing and scheduling and introduces several new concepts. We model a large-scale wireless sensor network as a tiered graph relative to its distance from the sink, and introduce the notion of relay graph and relay factor to direct the next-hop candidates toward the sink fairly and efficiently. The sink develops a transmission and reception schedule for the sensor nodes based on the tiered graph search for a set of nodes that can simultaneously transmit and receive. The resulting schedule eventually allows data from each sensor node to be delivered to the sink. We analyze our scheduling algorithm both numerically and by simulation, and we discuss the impact of protocol parameters. Further, we prove that our scheme is scalable to the number of nodes, from the perspectives of mean channel capacity and maximum number of concurrent transmission nodes. Compared with the existing TDMA scheduling schemes, our scheme shows better performance in network throughput, path length, end-to-end delay, and fairness index.     

Maximum lifetime routing in wireless sensor networks

A routing problem in static wireless ad hoc networks is considered as it arises in a rapidly deployed, sensor based, monitoring system known as the wireless sensor network. Information obtained by the monitoring nodes needs to be routed to a set of designated gateway nodes. In these networks, every node is capable of sensing, data processing, and communication, and operates on its limited amount of battery energy consumed mostly in transmission and reception at its radio transceiver. If we assume that the transmitter power level can be adjusted to use the minimum energy required to reach the intended next hop receiver then the energy consumption rate per unit information transmission depends on the choice of the next hop node, i.e., the routing decision. We formulate the routing problem as a linear programming problem, where the objective is to maximize the network lifetime, which is equivalent to the time until the network partition due to battery outage. Two different models are considered for the information-generation processes. One assumes constant rates and the other assumes an arbitrary process. A shortest cost path routing algorithm is proposed which uses link costs that reflect both the communication energy consumption rates and the residual energy levels at the two end nodes. The algorithm is amenable to distributed implementation. Simulation results with both information-generation process models show that the proposed algorithm can achieve network lifetime that is very close to the optimal network lifetime obtained by solving the linear programming problem.     

Efficient broadcast for wireless ad hoc networks with a realistic physical layer

In this paper, we investigate the low coverage problem of efficient broadcast protocols in wireless ad hoc networks with realistic physical layer models. To minimize energy consumption, efficient protocols aim to select small set of forward nodes and minimum transmission radii. In ideal physical layer model, nodes within forward nodes’ transmission ranges can definitely receive packets; therefore energy efficient protocols can guarantee full coverage for broadcasting. However, in networks with a realistic physical layer, nodes can only receive packets with probability. We present an analytical model to show that the transmission radii used for nodes can be used to establish a tradeoff between minimizing energy consumption and ensuring network coverage. We then propose a mechanism called redundant radius, which involves using two transmission radii, to form a buffer zone that guarantees the availability of logical links in the physical network, one for broadcast tree calculation and the other for actual data transmission. With this mechanism, we extend well-known centralized protocols, BIP and DBIP, and corresponding localized protocols, LBIP and LDBIP. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme in improving network coverage is validated analytically and by simulation.     

低占空比传感网中分布式的环状流水线工作调度研究

低占空比传感网中节点的长时间睡眠会导致数据查询延迟的增加.如何调度节点唤醒时间从而最小化延迟,是一个难解的组合优化问题.提出一个分布式的环状流水线调度算法,不用长时间等待即可进行数据传输.分析表明,算法可获得较低的延迟和更长的网络生命周期.     

VNE-AFS：基于人工鱼群的网络虚拟化映射算法

虚拟网络资源映射是云计算研究领域的一个难点问题。以降低底层网络映射开销为目标,提出一种基于人工鱼群的网络虚拟化映射算法VNE-AFS。根据虚拟网络请求对底层网络节点和链路的约束关系建立二进制组合优化模型,并利用人工鱼群算法实现虚拟网络资源向底层网络资源的近似最优映射。实验结果表明,与现有的虚拟网络映射算法相比,该算法有效地降低了底层网络的开销和求解时间,提高了虚拟网络映射的成功率、平均收益和资源利用率。