Novel algorithms for the network lifetime problem in wireless settings

One of the major concerns in wireless ad-hoc networks design is energy efficiency. Wireless devices are typically equipped with a limited energy supply sufficient only for a limited amount of time which is reversely proportional to the transmission power of the device. The network lifetime is defined as the time the first device runs out of its initial energy charge. In this paper we study the maximum network lifetime problem for broadcast and data gathering in wireless settings. We provide polynomial time approximation algorithms, with guaranteed performance bounds while considering omnidirectional and unidirectional transmissions. We also consider an extended variant of the maximum lifetime problem, which simultaneously satisfies additional constraints, such as bounded hop-diameter and degree of the routing tree, and minimizing the total energy used in a single transmission. Finally, we evaluate the performance of some of our algorithms through simulations.     

Capacity of data collection in randomly-deployed wireless sensor networks

Data collection is one of the most important functions provided by wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we study theoretical limitations of data collection and data aggregation in terms of delay and capacity for a wireless sensor network where n sensors are randomly deployed. We consider different communication scenarios such as with single sink or multiple sinks, regularly-deployed or randomly-deployed sinks, with or without aggregation. For each scenario, we not only propose a data collection/aggregation method and analyze its performance in terms of delay and capacity, but also theoretically prove whether our method can achieve the optimal order (i.e., its performance is within a constant factor of the optimal). Particularly, with a single sink, the capacity of data collection is in order of \Uptheta(W)\Uptheta(W) where W is the fixed data-rate on individual links. With k regularly deployed sinks, the capacity of data collection is increased to \Uptheta(kW)\Uptheta(kW) when k=O(\fracnlogn)k=O\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}\right) or \Uptheta(\fracnlognW)\Uptheta\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}W\right) when k=\Upomega(\fracnlogn)k=\Upomega\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}\right). With k randomly deployed sinks, the capacity of data collection is between \Uptheta(\fracklogkW)\Uptheta\left({\frac{k}{\log k}}W\right) and \Uptheta(kW)\Uptheta(kW) when k=O(\fracnlogn)k=O\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}\right) or \Uptheta(\fracnlognW)\Uptheta\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}W\right) when k=w(\fracnlogn)k=\omega\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}\right). If each sensor can aggregate its receiving packets into a single packet to send, the capacity of data collection with a single sink is also increased to \Uptheta(\fracnlognW)\Uptheta\left({\frac{n}{\log n}}W\right).     

Geography- and infrastructure-aware topology design methodology for broadband access networks (FTTx)

We present a topology design methodology for broadband (FTTx) access networks. The calculations are based on real geographic data (digital maps) and infrastructural information of the targeted area, using detailed and realistic cost models in order to provide results of practical interest. The developed heuristics offer low time consumption and nearly optimal solutions for the highly complex problem of minimal cost network deployment, due to the properly chosen and customized heuristic algorithms for the various network technologies. We review the specific properties of the FTTx network technologies, present a formal representation of the problem including a detailed cost function and network model and discuss complexity issues. The various solution techniques are presented along with case studies of real-life scenarios in order to show the potential of the methodology. The developed heuristic algorithms offer an approximation of the optimum within 10–15%, while time consumption remains in the range of a few minutes, even for large-scale scenarios with 10,000s of customers. Beyond topology design, the results provided by these methods are useful for a preliminary CAPEX estimation and techno-economic comparison.     

Analyzing the Next Generation Software Defined Radio for Future Architectures

Commercial and research work in the field of software defined radio (SDR) has produced designs which have been able to deliver the efficiency and computational power needed to process 3G wireless technologies. Though efficient 3G processing has been achieved by these designs, next generation 4G SDR technology requires 10–1000x more computational performance but limits the power budget increase to 2–5x. In this paper, we present a breakdown of the major 4G kernels and analyze two methods of increasing performance and reducing power consumption. Specifically, we consider the effect of SIMD width and reduction in number of register file accesses on the performance and energy consumption of a SDR architecture, SODA. We show that by increasing SIMD width we can gain almost 2–8x performance increase while increasing total energy used by 1–2x for different SIMD widths. We also show that by reducing SIMD register accesses we can reduce the total energy used by 5–20% for the 4G kernels.     

Nonlinear Simulation of a Cyclotron Autoresonance Maser (CARM) Operating in a Transverse Magnetic Mode

In the gyrotron operation, the transverse-magnetic (TM) mode is excluded because the TM mode instability vanishes when the vacuum waveguide mode and the beam mode are at grazing incidence. However, situation changes in a cyclotron autoresonance maser (CARM) interaction. In this paper nonlinear formulation of a TM-mode CARM is derived, and detailed simulations are presented for the TM_1,1-mode CARM. Simulation results show that a TM_1,1-mode CARM can reach high power of megawatts and ultrahigh gain of more than 70 dB, as a TE_1,1-mode gyrotron traveling wave tube (gyro-TWT) and TE_1,1-mode CARM did in the reported experiments.     

Synchronous multicast and broadcast service in multi-rate IEEE 802.16j WiMAX relay network

IEEE 802.16j Mobile Multihop Relay Standard defines multi-hop relay operation in a WiMAX system. It uses a novel synchronous multicast and broadcast transmission mechanism to achieve macro diversity. With the newly introduced synchronous delivery constraint, the multicast data delivery algorithm should be designed differently to enhance system performance. This paper provides Multi-Rate Selection Algorithm (MRSA) for multicast and broadcast (MBS) data delivery. It could reduce the data distribution delay from the BS to all the RSs. Besides, we also propose the path selection algorithm to further improve the effectiveness of MRSA. Our simulation results show that using MRSA with our shortest-path path selection algorithm, the delay for data delivery in 802.16j MBS system could be greatly reduced. The proposed scheme could achieve the performance closed to the optimal solutions. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first research work to investigate the IEEE 802.16j multicast and broadcast problem.     

A Simplified Internet Routing Architecture

This paper studies the effect of disaggregation on the size of the routing table in the Internet’s Default Free Zone (DFZ). Current practises for traffic balancing and protection against prefix hijacking in the Internet are based in disaggregating prefixes that cause an increase in size of the Internet’s core routing table. I propose an algorithm to assess their effect on the table size of these techniques. This algorithm is applied on routing tables collected by the RIPE’s Routing Repository between January 2001 and February 2011. The results show that before 2010, the IPv4 addressing space was gradually getting more fragmented. This trend is slowing down since the beginning of 2010, possibly as the result of the economic downturn. In the second part of this paper, I propose an alternative architecture that allows local Traffic Engineering configurations but keeps their effects from spreading over the Internet and outline an implementation for this architecture on a Linux platform.     

An Autonomic QoS-centric Architecture for Integrated Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

In this paper the problem of seamless mobility and proficient joint radio resource management over an all-IP internetworked wireless heterogeneous environment is addressed. Nodes’ autonomicity is envisioned as the enabler to devise a Quality of Service (QoS) aware architecture for supporting a variety of services, founded on a common utility based framework that provides enhanced flexibility in reflecting different access networks’ type of resources and diverse QoS prerequisites, under a unified QoS-aware resource allocation optimization problem. This allows a more in-depth intrinsic wireless network convergence, beyond All-IP, driven by QoS-oriented resource management. This vision is demonstrated and instantiated for integrated WLAN and cellular (both CDMA and OFDMA) networks, providing a viable path towards the evolution and realization of the future wireless networking paradigm. Initial numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and reveal the benefits of such a service oriented paradigm against other existing access oriented autonomic designs.     

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.