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.     

无线mesh网中一种基于博弈论的公平性路由协议

提出一种基于博弈论的以树为拓扑结构的公平性路由协议.新的协议综合了先验式路由和按需路由,并且将路由计算和信道资源分配控制分布到树中的每个枝节点上,降低了根节点的负担,使其更适合于无线 mesh网的通信需求.仿真结果表明,新的路由协议改进了AODV、HWMP路由协议的端到端平均延迟和网络吞吐量,并且网络中各个无线节点占有的信道资源基本相近,满足公平性原则.     

Distributed channel assignment combined with routing over multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

In order to realize the reduction of equipment cost and the demand of higher capacity,wireless mesh network(WMN) router devices usually have several interfaces and work on multi-channels.Jointing channel allocation,interface assignment and routing can efficiently improve the network capacity.This paper presents an efficient channel assignment scheme combined with the multi-radio link quality source routing(MR-LQSR) protocol,which is called channel assignment with MR-LQSR(CA-LQSR).In this scheme,a physical interference model is established:calculated transmission time(CTT) is proposed as the metric of channel assignment,which can reflect the real network environment and channel interference best,and enhanced weighted cumulative expected transmission time(EWCETT) is proposed as the routing metric,which preserves load balancing and bandwidth of links.Meantime,the expression of EWCETT contains the value of CTT,thus the total cost time of channel assignment and routing can be reduced.Simulation results show that our method has advantage of higher throughput,lower end-to-end time delay,and less network cost over some other existing methods.     

基于最大化网络吞吐量的WMN信道分配算法

为了解决无线Mesh网络中的信道分配问题,提出了一种基于博弈论的信道分配算法.该算法将网络中每一个节点模型化为一个博弈者,每个博弈者的策略为信道的分配方案,并将整个网络的吞吐量作为效用函数的目标,效用函数的物理意义则是在给定流量需求矩阵下传输的成功率.博弈者通过相互博弈来优化收益函数以最大化网络吞吐量.通过NS2.34仿真分析得出,GBCA算法在收敛性、丢包率和吞吐量上都要优于当前的算法.     

Fairness-oriented routing algorithm joint with power control and channel assignment for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

The multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh network （MRMC-WMN） draws general attention because of its excellent throughput performance, robustness and relative low cost. The closed interactions among power control （PC）, channel assignment （CA） and routing is contributed to the performance of multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks （MRMC-WMNs）. However, the joint PC, CA and routing （JPCR） design, desired to achieve a global optimization, was poor addressed. The authors present a routing algorithm joint with PC and CA （JPCRA） to seek the routing, power and channel scheme for each flow, which can improve the fairness performance. Firstly, considering available channels and power levels, the routing metric, called minimum flow rate, is designed based on the physical interference and Shannon channel models. The JPCRA is presented based on the genetic algorithm （GA） with simulated annealing to maximize the minimum flow rate, an non-deterministic polynomial-time hard （NP-Hard） problem. Simulations show the JPCRA obtains better fairness among different flows and higher network throughput.     

Efficient rate allocation,routing and channel assignment in wireless mesh networks supporting dynamic traffic flows

In this paper we address the issue of joint routing, channel re-assignment and rate allocation in multi-radio multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) with the goal of optimizing the performance of the current set of flows in the WMN. The objective is to balance the instantaneous traffic in the network at the flow level, optimize link-channel assignment and allocate flow rates to achieve proportional fairness given the current traffic and network constraints, including the topology, interference characteristics, number of available channels and radios. Unlike prior work, we do not assume a priori knowledge of traffic, and instead take into account the instantaneous traffic conditions to optimize performance at the flow level, taking both throughput and fairness into account. In this work we analyze the problem and, due to its hardness, propose a fast heuristic algorithm (JRCAR) to solve it. We evaluate this algorithm through numerical experiments, including comparisons against optimal solutions. In addition, we show that JRCAR can be used in a highly responsive system in practical scenarios with time-varying traffic conditions. We implement such a system under the ns-3 simulator, where the simulation results obtained corroborate the behavior observed in the numerical experiments and show that JRCAR is effective in dynamic and practical conditions.     

A topology preserving cluster‐based channel assignment for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) with multiple radios and multiple channels are expected to resolve the capacity limitation problem of simpler wireless networks. However, optimal WMN channel assignment (CA) is NP complete, and it requires an optimal mapping of available channels to interfaces mounted over mesh routers. Acceptable solutions to CA must minimize network interference and maximize available network throughput. In this paper, we propose a CA solution called as cluster‐based channel assignment (CBCA). CBCA aims at minimizing co‐channel interference yet retaining topology through non‐default CA. Topology preservation is important because it avoids network partitions and is compatible with single‐interface routers in the network. A ‘non‐default’ CA solution is desired because it uses interfaces over different channels and reduces medium contention among neighbors. To the best of our knowledge, CBCA is a unique cluster‐based CA algorithm that addresses topology preservation using a non‐default channel approach. The main advantage of CBCA is it runs in a distributed manner by allowing cluster heads to perform CA independently. CBCA runs in three stages, where first the WMN nodes are partitioned into clusters. The second stage performs binding of interfaces to neighbors and third stage performs CA. The proposed algorithm improves over previous work because it retains network topology and minimizes network interference, which in turn improves available network throughput. Further, when compared with two other CBCA algorithms, CBCA provides better performance in terms of improved network interference, throughput, delay, and packet delivery ratios when tested upon network topologies with various network densities and traffic loads. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A cross‐layer optimization for maximum‐revenue‐based multicast in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks

Given a video/audio streaming system installed on a multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network, we are interested in a problem concerning about how to construct a delay‐constrained multicast tree to support concurrent interference‐free transmissions so that the number of serviced mesh clients is maximized. In this paper, we propose a heuristic approach called cross‐layer and load‐oriented (CLLO) algorithm for the problem. On the basis of the cross‐layer design paradigm, our CLLO algorithm can consider application demands, multicast routing, and channel assignment jointly during the formation of a channel‐allocated multicast tree. The experimental results show that the proposed CLLO outperforms the layered approaches in terms of the number of serviced mesh clients and throughputs. This superiority is due to information from higher layers can be used to guide routing selection and channel allocation at the same time. As a result, the CLLO algorithm can explore more solution spaces than the traditional layered approaches. In addition to that, we also propose a channel adjusting procedure to enhance the quality of channel‐allocated multicast trees. According to our simulations, it is proved to be an effective method for improving the performance of the proposed CLLO algorithm. Copyright © 2013 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.     

Two‐stage channel assignment scheme in wireless networks

This paper presents a new channel assignment scheme that efficiently improves the spatial frequency–spectrum reuse in a wireless network with heterogeneous demands, in which the cells are partitioned into a lot of clusters. Since the channel demands of each cell are different, this scheme adopts two stages to effectively assign channels. In the first stage, the cluster‐based scheme allocates a number of channels to the cells of each cluster for satisfying the requirement of co‐channel reuse. The channel demand of majority cells will be satisfied in this stage. In the second stage, when the channel requirement of most cells has been fulfilled, the tree‐based assignment scheme allocates channels for the minority cells, which are still lacking of channels. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme is superior to the previous schemes. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tree‐based channel assignment schemes for multi‐channel wireless sensor networks

Many sensor node platforms used for establishing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can support multiple radio channels for wireless communication. Therefore, rather than using a single radio channel for whole network, multiple channels can be utilized in a sensor network simultaneously to decrease overall network interference, which may help increase the aggregate network throughput and decrease packet collisions and delays. This method, however, requires appropriate schemes to be used for assigning channels to nodes for multi‐channel communication in the network. Because data generated by sensor nodes are usually delivered to the sink node using routing trees, a tree‐based channel assignment scheme is a natural approach for assigning channels in a WSN. We present two fast tree‐based channel assignment schemes (called bottom up channel assignment and neighbor count‐based channel assignment) for multi‐channel WSNs. We also propose a new interference metric that is used by our algorithms in making decisions. We validated and evaluated our proposed schemes via extensive simulation experiments. Our simulation results show that our algorithms can decrease interference in a network, thereby increasing performance, and that our algorithms are good alternatives for static channel assignment in WSNs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

无线mesh网络安全研究

无线mesh网络（wireless mesh networks,WMN）是下一代网络中的新型技术,和传统网络不同,它不依赖任何固定的设施,主机可以相互依赖保持网络连接,WISP可以利用它提供快速、简单、低廉的网络部署,然而存在一个主要的问题是容易遭受攻击。介绍了无线mesh网络的体系机构以及特点,分析并研究其存在的安全性威胁以及现有的关键安全解决机制。     

A weighted interference estimation scheme for interface‐switching wireless mesh networks

The co‐channel interference problem in wireless mesh networks (WMN) is extremely serious due to the heavy aggregated traffic loads and limited available channels. It is preferable for mesh routers to dynamically switch channels according to the accurate estimation of co‐channel interference level in the neighborhood. Most developed interference estimation schemes, however, do not consider the impact of interface switching. Furthermore, the interference in wireless networks has been extensively considered as an all‐or‐nothing event. In this paper, we develop a weighted interference estimation scheme (WIES) for interface‐switching WMN. WIES takes a new version of multi‐interface conflict graph that considers the impacts of frequent interface switching as the interference relationship estimation scheme. Besides, WIES uses a weight to estimate the interference level between links. The weight utilizes two empirical functions to denote the impacts of the relative distance and characteristics of traffic loads in WMN. Extensive NS2 simulations show that WIES achieves significant performance improvements, especially when the interference level of the network is high. We also validate that the interference level of networks is affected by several system parameters such as the number of available channels and the ratio between interference range and transmission range. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Joint processing of topology control and channel assignment in wireless ad hoc networks

Network topology construction and its channel assignment for each node in the constructed network topology are two main problems in the initialization of topology building. Topology control is an effective way to solve the problem of topology building. To investigate the joint effect of topology control and channel assignment, we propose a joint processing scheme composed of a k‐Neighbor topology control algorithm and a greedy channel assignment (GCA) algorithm in this paper. Based on this joint processing scheme, the relationships between the energy consumption, the total required channel number and the network connectivity are discussed. We also discuss the impact of some parameters on the performance of networks in terms of the path loss factor, node density, maximum node degree, etc. Our main contributions in this paper is that we find that topology control has a good effect on improving the performance of channel assignment, and the proposed joint processing scheme can reduce the required channel number effectively, compared with its theoretical upper bound. In particular, if the node degree in a network is not more than k, various simulations indicate that the required channel number is not more than 2k + 1. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A cross‐layer TCP for providing fairness in wireless mesh networks

The fair allocation of resources among different nodes is one of the critical problems in wireless mesh networks. Existing solutions mainly focus on rate‐limitation policies or distributed fair MAC schemes at the potential expense of total network utilization. This paper investigates a special starvation problem among TCP flows that are different hops away from the BS, as well as its recently proposed solution, the ‘Minimum Content Window’ policy based on IEEE 802.11e. It is found that the aggregate throughput degrades sharply because the effect of this policy on the TCP congestion mechanism has been overlooked. This paper proposes a priority‐based congestion control by using ‘Cross‐Layer Explicit Congestion Notification’. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can improve the fairness of TCP flows while the aggregate throughput is at least 20% higher than the ‘Minimum Content Window’ policy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

多媒体无线网中QoS降级的公平性研究

对无线，移动多媒体网中多服务类、多优先级的适应多媒体应用QoS降级的公平性问题进行了研究。提出降级因子加权平方和最小的降级原则，不但考虑了类间和类内优先级，而且考虑了用户的QoS降级深度。接着，证明对离散型适应多媒体应用，降级因子加权平方和最小的降级原则满足广义的按比例公平性，而对连续型适应多媒体应用，满足按比例公平性。最后，用量子遗传算法对所给问题进行了求解，结果进一步验证了所提算法的有效性。     

An efficient traffic control system using dynamic thresholding techniques in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) depend on a resilient and high‐performance infrastructure to provide users pervasive Internet access. In WMNs, all Internet traffic will be forwarded to the Internet gateways. Hence, these gateways are generally bottleneck nodes. This work proposes a traffic control technique to reduce the bottleneck problem and increase the utilization of network resources. Our approach provides a traffic control strategy that exploits dynamic techniques to adjust the threshold according to the traffic load of each gateway. The base threshold is defined in order to effectively control the traffic. When the current load exceeds the threshold of a gateway, the traffic redirection strategy is implemented by switching border nodes. The service regions can be adjusted for each gateway based on the traffic load. Furthermore, the proposed dynamic thresholding approaches can distribute the workloads of gateways and maintain the thresholds of any two gateways within a level range, making an in‐band balance of load. Thus, our proposed scheme can handle the unnecessary traffic redirection and reduce the traffic control overhead for various distributions of traffic. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio and efficiency, especially in bursty traffic environments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On energy‐efficient performance‐guaranteed channel assignment in cognitive radio‐based wireless mesh networks

In recent years, in order to make efficient use of spectrum resources, much attention has been given to solving the problem of channel assignment in cognitive radio‐based wireless mesh networks (CR‐WMNs). Current approaches focus mainly on avoiding interference in order to enhance performance in terms of throughput. WMNs are intended to provide low‐cost multimedia communication. Therefore, in order to provide low‐cost real‐time communication, channel assignment in CR‐WMNs should take into consideration not only the issue of throughput, but also energy consumption and delays. In this paper, we first define an optimization problem to maximize the end‐to‐end throughput per unit of energy consumption while minimizing, as well as guaranteeing, the delay constraint specified for a data stream. Based on this, we then propose a novel distributive heuristic channel assignment approach to solve the optimization problem in a self‐organized manner. Finally, we present the simulation results to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution in terms of end‐to‐end throughput per unit of energy consumption and delays. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

无线Mesh网中时延约束抖动优化的多路径流量分配算法

针对无线mesh网中多媒体应用的特点,研究多路径传输中路径时延满足约束且路径间抖动最小化的路径流量分配问题。首先,基于网络演算理论分析了数据分组在无线mesh网单路径传输中产生的队列时延,推导出单路径传输的时延上界以及多路径传输中的路径间时延抖动上界,并得到满足时延约束的路径最大容许流入速率;然后,基于时延及其抖动上界,提出满足时延约束抖动优化的路径流量分配算法DCJOTA,该算法根据路径最大容许流入速率按比例分配各路径流量,同时尽可能减小路径间的时延抖动;最后,分析了算法DCJOTA的可行性及其实现方法,并在NS2网络模拟器中验证了该算法的有效性。仿真实验表明,与AOMDV协议相比,集成了DCJOTA算法的多路径路由协议DCJO-AOMDV协议在时延及其抖动方面具有更好的表现:端到端平均时延降低3.9%,端到端平均时延抖动减小24.5%。另外,DCJOTA算法带来协议复杂性略微增加,DCJO-AOMDV协议下的网络吞吐量下降1.7%。