On Throughput Efficiency of Geographic Opportunistic Routing in Multihop Wireless Networks

Geographic opportunistic routing (GOR) has shown throughput efficiency in coping with unreliable transmissions in multihop wireless networks. The basic idea behind opportunistic routing is to take advantage of the broadcast nature and spacial diversity of the wireless medium by involving multiple neighbors of the sender into the local forwarding, thus improve transmission reliability. The existing GOR schemes typically involve as many as available next-hop neighbors into the local forwarding, and give the nodes closer to the destination higher relay priorities. In this paper, we show that it is not always the optimal way to achieve the best throughput. We introduce a framework to analyze the one-hop throughput of GOR, provide a deeper insight into the trade-off between the benefit (packet advancement and transmission reliability) and cost (medium time delay) associated with the node collaboration, and propose a local metric named expected one-hop throughput (EOT) to balance the benefit and cost. We also identify an upper bound of EOT and its concavity, which indicates that even if the candidate coordination delay were negligible, the throughput gain would become marginal when the number of forwarding candidates increases. Based on the EOT, we also propose a local candidate selection and prioritization algorithm. Simulation results validate our analysis and show that the EOT metric leads to both better one-hop and path throughput than the corresponding pure GOR and geographic routing.     

High-performance architectures for IP-based multihop 802.11 networks

The concept of a forwarding node, which receives packets from upstream nodes and then transmits these packets to downstream nodes, is a key element of any multihop network, wired or wireless. While high-speed IP router architectures have been extensively studied for wired networks, the concept of a "wireless IP router" has not been addressed so far. We examine the limitations of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in supporting a low-latency and high-throughput IP datapath comprising multiple wireless LAN hops. We first propose a wireless IP forwarding architecture that uses MPLS with modifications to 802.11 MAC to significantly improve packet forwarding efficiency. We then study further enhancements to 802.11 MAC that improve system throughput by allowing a larger number of concurrent packet transmissions in multihop 802.11-based IP networks. With 802.11 poised to be the dominant technology for wireless LANs, we believe a combined approach to MAC, packet forwarding, and transport layer protocols is needed to make high-performance multihop 802.11 networks practically viable.     

Optimal Query-Driven Data Forwarding for Delay-Sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Most of existing works on the topic of real-time routing for wireless sensor networks suffer from void forwarding paths (cannot reach the destination, but have to backtrack) and time overhead of handling isolated nodes. Designing a desired real-time data forwarding protocol as well as achieving a good tradeoff between real time and energy efficiency (as well as energy balance) for delay-sensitive wireless sensor networks remains a crucial and challenging issue. In this paper, we propose an optimal query-driven data forwarding framework that each sensor gets its optimal data forwarding paths (directed acyclic graphs) based on the query messages flooded by the base station without extra overhead. Furthermore, First Forwarding Nodes and Second Forwarding Nodes schemes are developed for data forwarding. In addition, two greedy distributed data forwarding algorithms are provided base on hybrid link cost model trying to achieve energy balance and congestion avoidance in data forwarding. Our framework is fully distributed and practical to implement, as well as robust and scalable to topological changes. The extensive simulations show that our framework has significantly outperformed the existing routing protocols in terms of real time and energy efficiency.     

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.     

Energy‐efficient void avoidance geographic routing protocol for underwater sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) consist of a group of sensors that send the information to the sonobuoys at the surface level. Void area, however, is one of the challenges faced by UWSNs. When a sensor falls in a void area of communication, it causes problems such as high latency, power consumption, or packet loss. In this paper, an energy‐efficient void avoidance geographic routing protocol (EVAGR) has been proposed to handle the void area with low amount of energy consumption. In this protocol, a suitable set of forwarding nodes is selected using a weight function, and the data packets are forwarded to the nodes inside the set. The weight function includes the consumed energy and the depth of the candidate neighboring nodes, and candidate neighboring node selection is based on the packet advancement of the neighboring nodes toward the sonobuoys. Extensive simulation experiments were performed to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed protocol. Simulation results revealed that the proposed protocol can effectively achieve better performance in terms of energy consumption, packet drop, and routing overhead compared with the similar routing protocol.     

Environment-Driven Opportunity Forwarding Cross-Layer Optimization for Ubiquitous Wireless Networks

In this paper, an environment-driven cross-layer optimization scheme is proposed to maximize packet forwarding efficiency. The proposed algorithm is aimed to improve the performance of location-based routing protocol in respect of greedy forwarding and avoid void regions for ubiquitous wireless networks. In greedy forwarding mode, we use a new routing metric IAPS which can estimate the forwarding distance, link quality and the difficulty of channel access during the process of the next hop node selection. When the packet forwarding comes into a local minimum, the proposed scheme uses an opportunistic forwarding method based on competitive advantage to bypass the void regions. NS2 simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can improve network resource utilization and the average throughput, and reduce congestion loss rate of wireless multi-hop network comparison with existing GPSR algorithm.     

On selection of forwarding nodes for long opportunistic routes

Opportunistic routing is a promising routing paradigm which increases the network throughput. It forces the sender’s neighbors, who successfully overheard the transmitted packet, to participate in the packet forwarding process as intermediate forwarding nodes. As a seminal opportunistic routing protocol, MORE combines network coding idea with opportunistic routing to eliminate the need for strict coordination among active forwarding nodes. In this paper, we show that MORE performance does not scale well with the route length, especially when the route length goes beyond two hops. Also, we found that MORE fails to establish a working opportunistic route in sparse networks. Clearly, the network throughput is directly influenced by both the quantity and quality of forwarding nodes, and their cooperation order. In this paper, we propose a new forwarder selection mechanism which considers the route length, link qualities, the distance from the source, and nodes density. It eliminates the occasional route disconnectivity happening in MORE and improves the quality of the established opportunistic routes. The simulation result indicates that our proposal always outperforms MORE when dealing with long opportunistic routes.

     

BER-based Power Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, there are many information exchanges between different terminals. In order to guarantee a good level of Quality of Service (QoS), the source node should be smart enough to pick a stable and good quality communication route in order to avoid any unnecessary packet loss. Due to the error-prone links in a wireless network, it is very likely that the transmitted packets over consecutive links may get corrupted or even lost. It is known that retransmissions will increase the overhead in the network, which in turns increase the total energy consumption during data transmission. In this paper, we focus on the Bit Error Rate (BER) during packet transmission and propose a power scheduling scheme to reduce the total energy consumption in the routing. Our approach controls the transmission power of each transmitter to achieve the minimum energy consumption for successful packet transmission. Considering the limited bandwidth resource, we also plan the multihop route while considering the BER and network load at the same time. The simulation results show that our approach can reduce the total energy consumption during data transmission.     

A novel real-time scheme for (m,k)-firm streams in wireless sensor networks

The multimedia transmission based real-time applications have posed a big challenge to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where both reliability and timeliness need to be guaranteed at the same time, to support an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). The existing real-time routing protocols, however, are not able to meet the QoS requirements of realtime applications because of the inherent resource constraint of sensor nodes and instability of wireless communication. Therefore, we propose a real-time scheme in this paper, including a QoS-aware routing protocol and a set of fault recovery mechanisms, for (m,k)-firm based real-time applications over WSNs. A local status indicator which is specially devised for (m,k)-firm stream, is used for intermediate nodes to monitor and evaluate their local conditions. The proposed routing protocol takes into account of packet deadline, node condition and remaining energy of next hop, to make optimal forwarding decision. Additionally, according to the stream QoS and node condition, the proposed fault recovery mechanisms are utilized for nodes to handle the congestion, link failure and void problems occurred during transmission and remain the desired reliability and timeliness requirements. The proposed scheme has been well studied and verified through simulations. The results have proved the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of high successful transmission ratio, small end-to-end delay and long lifetime of network.     

EARQ: Energy Aware Routing for Real-Time and Reliable Communication in Wireless Industrial Sensor Networks

Wireless industrial sensor networks are wireless sensor networks which have been adapted to industrial applications. Most techniques for wireless sensor networks can be applied to wireless industrial sensor networks. However, for industrial applications of wireless industrial sensor networks, new requirements such as real-time, reliable delivery need to be considered. In this paper, we propose EARQ, which is a novel routing protocol for wireless industrial sensor networks. It provides real-time, reliable delivery of a packet, while considering energy awareness. In EARQ, a node estimates the energy cost, delay and reliability of a path to the sink node, based only on information from neighboring nodes. Then, it calculates the probability of selecting a path, using the estimates. When packet forwarding is required, it randomly selects the next node. A path with lower energy cost is likely to be selected, because the probability is inversely proportional to the energy cost to the sink node. To achieve real-time delivery, only paths that may deliver a packet in time are selected. To achieve reliability, it may send a redundant packet via an alternate path, but only if it is a source of a packet. Experimental results show that EARQ is suitable for industrial applications, due to its capability for energy efficient, real-time, reliable communications.      

Link state opportunistic routing for multihop wireless networks

Wireless Networks - Enhancing the quality of service is the crucial issue of future wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a new multihop wireless routing protocol inspired by opportunistic...     

无线多跳网络中一种基于网络编码的机会路由

近年来机会路由和网络编码是两种利用无线信道广播特性提高网络性能的新兴技术。相比传统的静态路由决策,机会路由利用动态和机会路由选择减轻无线有损链路带来的影响。网络编码可以提高网络的资源利用率。但编码机会依赖于多个并发流所选路径的相对结构。为了创造更多的网络编码机会和提高网络吞吐量,本文提出了一种基于流间网络编码的机会路由(ORNC)算法。在ORNC中,每个分组转发的机会路径选择是基于网络编码感知的方式进行的。当没有编码机会时,采用背压策略选择下一跳转发路径以平衡网络负载。仿真结果表明本文提出的ORNC算法能够提高无线多跳网络的吞吐量。     

The Impact of Deployment Pattern and Routing Scheme on the Lifetime in Multi-Sink Wireless Sensor Network

Extensive use of sensor and actuator networks in many real-life applications introduced several new performance metrics at the node and network level. Since wireless sensor nodes have significant battery constraints, therefore, energy efficiency, as well as network lifetime, are among the most significant performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of given network architecture. This work investigates the performance of an event-based data delivery model using a multipath routing scheme for a wireless sensor network with multiple sink nodes. This routing algorithm follows a sink initiated route discovery process with the location information of the source nodes already known to the sink nodes. It also considers communication link costs before making decisions for packet forwarding. Carried out simulation compares the network performance of a wireless sensor network with a single sink, dual sink, and multi sink networking approaches. Based on a series of simulation experiments, the lifetime aware multipath routing approach is found appropriate for increasing the lifetime of sensor nodes significantly when compared to other similar routing schemes. However, energy-efficient packet forwarding is a major concern of this work; other network performance metrics like delay, average packet latency, and packet delivery ratio are also taken into the account.

     

Aggregated traffic flow weight controlled hierarchical MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

It has been discussed in the literature that the medium-access control (MAC) protocols, which schedule periodic sleep–active states of sensor nodes, can increase the longevity of sensor networks. However, these protocols suffer from very low end-to-end throughput and increased end-to-end packet delay. How to design an energy-efficient MAC protocol that greatly minimizes the packet delay while maximizing the achievable data delivery rate, however, remains unanswered. In this paper, motivated by the many-to-one multihop traffic pattern of sensor networks and the heterogeneity in required data packet rates of different events, we propose an aggregated traffic flow weight controlled hierarchical MAC protocol (ATW-HMAC). We find that ATW-HMAC significantly decreases the packet losses due to collisions and buffer drops (i.e., mitigates the congestion), which helps to improve network throughput, energy efficiency, and end-to-end packet delay. ATW-HMAC is designed to work with both single-path and multipath routing. Our analytical analysis shows that ATW-HMAC provides weighted fair rate allocation and energy efficiency. The results of our extensive simulation, done in ns-2.30, show that ATW-HMAC outperforms S-MAC; traffic-adaptive medium access; and SC-HMAC.     

Channel-quality-aware multihop broadcast for asynchronous multi-channel wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose Multi-channel EMBA (M-EMBA), efficient multihop broadcast for asynchronous multi-channel wireless sensor networks. Our scheme employs two channel-quality-aware forwarding policies of improved forwarder’s guidance and fast forwarding to improve multihop broadcast performance. The improved forwarder’s guidance allows forwarders to transmit broadcast messages with guidance to their receivers through channels with good quality. The guidance indicates how each receiver should forward the broadcast message to its neighbor nodes. The improved forwarder’s guidance tremendously reduces redundant transmissions and collisions. Fast forwarding allows adjacent forwarders to send their broadcast messages simultaneously through different channels that have good quality, which helps to reduce multihop broadcast latency and improve multi-channel broadcast utility. In this work, we evaluate the multihop broadcast performance of M-EMBA through theoretical analysis of the system design and empirical simulation-based analysis. We implement M-EMBA in ns-2 and compare it with the broadcast schemes of ARM, EM-MAC, and MuchMAC. The performance results show that M-EMBA outperforms these protocols in both light and heavy network traffic. M-EMBA reduces message cost in terms of goodput, total bytes transmitted, as well as broadcast redundancy and collision. M-EMBA also achieves a high broadcast success ratio and low multihop broadcast latency. Finally, M-EMBA significantly improves energy efficiency by reducing average duty cycle.     

Intelligent beaconless geographical forwarding for urban vehicular environments

A Vehicular Ad hoc Network is a type of wireless ad hoc network that facilitates ubiquitous connectivity between vehicles in the absence of fixed infrastructure. Source based geographical routing has been proven to perform well in unstable vehicular networks. However, these routing protocols leverage beacon messages to update the positional information of all direct neighbour nodes. As a result, high channel congestion or problems with outdated neighbour lists may occur. To this end, we propose a street-aware, Intelligent Beaconless (IB) geographical forwarding protocol based on modified 802.11 Request To Send (RTS)/ Clear To Send frames, for urban vehicular networks. That is, at the intersection, each candidate junction node leverage digital road maps as well as distance to destination, power signal strength of the RTS frame and direction routing metrics to determine if it should elect itself as a next relay node. For packet forwarding between Intersections, on the other hand, the candidate node considers the relative direction to the packet carrier node and power signal strength of the RTS frame as routing metrics to elect itself based on intelligently combined metrics. After designing the IB protocol, we implemented it and compared it with standard protocols. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can improve average delay and successful packet delivery ratio in realistic wireless channel conditions and urban vehicular scenarios.     

一种适用于异步无线传感器网络的机会路由机制

无线传感器网络通常使用低占空比的异步睡眠调度来降低节点能耗。由于发送节点在接收节点醒来后才能向其发送数据,这将引入额外的等待时延。在最近的一些任播路由机制中,发送节点动态地选择最先醒来的候选节点转发数据,以最小化等待时延。但是,由于从最先醒来的候选节点到基站的时延可能并不低,任播路由机制并不一定能最小化端到端总时延。为此,提出了一种适用于异步无线传感器网络的机会路由机制,将路由决策建模为强马尔科夫过程,并根据最优停止理论推导出该过程一种简化的停止规则。仿真结果表明,节点到基站的最大端到端时延仅为基于地理位置的机会路由的68.5%。     

Hierarchical geographic multicast routing for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks comprise typically dense deployments of large networks of small wireless capable sensor devices. In such networks, multicast is a fundamental routing service for efficient data dissemination required for activities such as code updates, task assignment and targeted queries. In particular, efficient multicast for sensor networks is critical due to the limited energy availability in such networks. Multicast protocols that exploit location information available from GPS or localization algorithms are more efficient and robust than other stateful protocols as they avoid the difficulty of maintaining distributed state (multicast tree). Since localization is typically already required for sensing applications, this location information can simply be reused for optimizing multicast performance at no extra cost. Recently, two protocols were proposed to optimize two orthogonal aspects of location-based multicast protocols: GMR (Sanchez et al. GMR: Geographic multicast routing for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE SECON, 2006) improves the forwarding efficiency by exploiting the wireless multicast advantage but it suffers from scalability issues when dealing with large sensor networks. On the other hand, HRPM (Das et al. Distributed hashing for scalable multicast in wireless ad hoc networks. IEEE TPDS 47(4):445–487, 2007) reduces the encoding overhead by constructing a hierarchy at virtually no maintenance cost via the use of geographic hashing but it is energy-inefficient due to inefficacies in forwarding data packets. In this paper, we present HGMR (hierarchical geographic multicast routing), a new location-based multicast protocol that seamlessly incorporates the key design concepts of GMR and HRPM and optimizes them for wireless sensor networks by providing both forwarding efficiency (energy efficiency) as well as scalability to large networks. Our simulation studies show that: (i) In an ideal environment, HGMR incurs a number of transmissions either very close to or lower than GMR, and, at the same time, an encoding overhead very close to HRPM, as the group size or the network size increases. (ii) In a realistic environment, HGMR, like HRPM, achieves a Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) that is close to perfect and much higher than GMR. Further, HGMR has the lowest packet delivery latency among the three protocols, while incurring much fewer packet transmissions than HRPM. (iii) HGMR is equally efficient with both uniform and non-uniform group member distributions.     

Congestion Aware Geographic Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Geographic routing protocols forward packets according to the geographical locations of nodes. Thus, the criteria used to select a forwarding node impacts on the performance of the protocols such as energy efficiency and end-to-end transmission delay. In this paper, we propose a congestion aware forwarder selection (CAFS) method for a geographic routing protocol. To design CAFS, we devise a cost function by combining not only the forward progress made to a packet but also the amount of energy required for packet forwarding, forwarding direction, and congestion levels of potential forwarders. Among the potential forwarders, CAFS selects the next forwarder having the minimum cost. In our simulation studies, we compare the performance of CAFS with those of the maximum progress (MP) method and the cost over progress (CoP) method in various network conditions. The results show that compared with MP, the length of a routing path in terms of the number of hops becomes longer when CAFS is used. However, the shorter hop distance helps to avoid unnecessary retransmissions caused by packet loss in a wireless channel. In addition, since CAFS considers congestion levels of candidate forwarders, it reduces the queuing delay in each forwarder. Therefore, CAFS is superior to the MP and the CoP in terms of the energy consumption, end-to-end packet transfer delay, and the successful packet delivery rate.     

Energy‐aware geographic routing in wireless sensor networks with anchor nodes

Energy efficiency has become an important design consideration in geographic routing protocols for wireless sensor networks because the sensor nodes are energy constrained and battery recharging is usually not feasible. However, numerous existing energy‐aware geographic routing protocols are energy‐inefficient when the detouring mode is involved in the routing. Furthermore, most of them rarely or at most implicitly take into account the energy efficiency in the advance. In this paper, we present a novel energy‐aware geographic routing (EAGR) protocol that attempts to minimize the energy consumption for end‐to‐end data delivery. EAGR adaptively uses an existing geographic routing protocol to find an anchor list based on the projection distance of nodes for guiding packet forwarding. Each node holding the message utilizes geographic information, the characteristics of energy consumption, and the metric of advanced energy cost to make forwarding decisions, and dynamically adjusts its transmission power to just reach the selected node. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme exhibits higher energy efficiency, smaller end‐to‐end delay, and better packet delivery ratio compared to other geographic routing protocols. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.