Basem Shihada

Energy efficiency in TDMA-based next-generation passive optical access networks

Next-generation passive optical network (PON) has been considered in the past few years as a cost-effective broadband access technology. With the ever-increasing power saving concern, energy efficiency has been an important issue in its operations. In this paper, we propose a novel sleep-time sizing and scheduling framework for the implementation of green bandwidth allocation (GBA) in TDMA-PONs. The proposed framework leverages the batch-mode transmission feature of GBA to minimize the overhead due to frequent ONU on-off transitions. The optimal sleeping time sequence of each ONU is determined in every cycle without violating the maximum delay requirement. With multiple ONUs possibly accessing the shared media simultaneously, a collision may occur. To address this problem, we propose a new sleep-time sizing mechanism, namely Sort-And-Shift (SAS), in which the ONUs are sorted according to their expected transmission start times, and their sleep times are shifted to resolve any possible collision while ensuring maximum energy saving. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework and highlight the merits of our solutions .

Transport control protocol in optical burst switched networks: issues, solutions, and challenges

Since its advent in 1981, TCP has been subject to a tremendous amount of research effort and enhancements for achieving better performance over various network environments and application scenarios. Due to the transmission characteristics of optical burst switched networks, such as random burst dropping, retro-blocking (i.e., bursts proceeding or delayed from their actual reservation time slot), burstification delay, and burst signaling delay, TCP could be significantly affected if no corresponding countermeasure and enhancement are developed. In this review article we provide a comprehensive survey on reported studies for TCP enhancements over OBS networks in order to mitigate the numerous side effects due to the buffer- less characteristic of burst transmission. Furthermore, we closely analyze TCP behavior over OBS networks with various burst transmission characteristics while highlighting the open challenges that have not yet been extensively tackled or solved.

A Novel Message Scheduling Framework for Delay Tolerant Networks Routing

Multicopy routing strategies have been considered the most applicable approaches to achieve message delivery in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Epidemic routing and two-hop forwarding routing are two well-reported approaches for delay tolerant networks routing which allow multiple message replicas to be launched in order to increase message delivery ratio and/or reduce message delivery delay. This advantage, nonetheless, is at the expense of additional buffer space and bandwidth overhead. Thus, to achieve efficient utilization of network resources, it is important to come up with an effective message scheduling strategy to determine which messages should be forwarded and which should be dropped in case of buffer is full. This paper investigates a new message scheduling framework for epidemic and two-hop forwarding routing in DTNs, such that the forwarding/dropping decision can be made at a node during each contact for either optimal message delivery ratio or message delivery delay. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed message scheduling framework can achieve better performance than its counterparts.

Energy Efficient Resource Allocation for Cognitive Radios: A Generalized Sensing Analysis

In this paper, two resource allocation schemes for energy efficient cognitive radio systems are proposed. Our design considers resource allocation approaches that adopt spectrum sharing combined with soft-sensing information, adaptive sensing thresholds, and adaptive power to achieve an energy efficient system. An energy per good-bit metric is considered as an energy efficient objective function. A multi-carrier system, such as, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, is considered in the framework. The proposed resource allocation schemes, using different approaches, are designated as sub-optimal and optimal. The sub-optimal approach is attained by optimizing over a channel inversion power policy. The optimal approach utilizes the calculus of variation theory to optimize a problem of instantaneous objective function subject to average and instantaneous constraints with respect to functional optimization variables. In addition to the analytical results, selected numerical results are provided to quantify the impact of soft-sensing information and the optimal adaptive sensing threshold on the system performance.

Optimal Node Placement in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are expected to play a vital role in the exploration and monitoring of underwater areas which are not easily reachable by humans. However, underwater communication via acoustic waves is subject to several performance limitations that are very different from those used for terresstrial networks. In this paper, we investigate node placement for building an initial underwater WSN infrastructure. We formulate this problem as a nonlinear mathematical program with the objective of minimizing the total transmission loss under a given number of sensor nodes and targeted coverage volume. The obtained solution is the location of each node represented via a truncated octahedron to fill out the 3D space. Experiments are conducted to verify the proposed formulation, which is solved using Matlab optimization tool. Simulation is also conducted using an ns-3 simulator, and the simulation results are consistent with the obtained results from mathematical model with less than 10% error.

Self-Adaptive Contention Aware Routing Protocol for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

This paper introduces a novel multicopy routing protocol, called Self-Adaptive Utility-based Routing Protocol (SAURP), for Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) that are possibly composed of a vast number of devices in miniature such as smart phones of heterogeneous capacities in terms of energy resources and buffer spaces. SAURP is characterized by the ability of identifying potential opportunities for forwarding messages to their destinations via a novel utility function-based mechanism, in which a suite of environment parameters, such as wireless channel condition, nodal buffer occupancy, and encounter statistics, are jointly considered. Thus, SAURP can reroute messages around nodes experiencing high-buffer occupancy, wireless interference, and/or congestion, while taking a considerably small number of transmissions. The developed utility function in SAURP is proved to be able to achieve optimal performance, which is further analyzed via a stochastic modeling approach. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the developed analytical model and compare the proposed SAURP with a number of recently reported encounter-based routing approaches in terms of delivery ratio, delivery delay, and the number of transmissions required for each message delivery. The simulation results show that SAURP outperforms all the counterpart multicopy encounter-based routing protocols considered in the study.

ARBR: Adaptive reinforcement-based routing for DTN

This paper introduces a novel routing protocol in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), aiming to solve the online distributed routing problem. By manipulating a collaborative reinforcement learning technique, a group of nodes can cooperate with each other and make a forwarding decision for the stored messages based on a cost function at each contact with another node. The proposed protocol is characterized by not only considering the contact time statistics under a novel contact model, but also looks into the feedback on user behavior and network conditions, such as congestion and buffer occupancy sampled during each previous contact with any other node. Therefore, the proposed protocol can achieve high efficiency via an adaptive and intelligent routing mechanism according to network conditions. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the proposed protocol, where a comparison is made with a number of existing encounter-based routing protocols in term of the number of transmissions of each message, message delivery delay, and delivery ratio. The results of the simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

On Event Detection and Localization in Acyclic Flow Networks

Acyclic flow networks, present in many infrastructures of national importance (e.g., oil and gas and water distribution systems), have been attracting immense research interest. Existing solutions for detecting and locating attacks against these infrastructures have been proven costly and imprecise, particularly when dealing with large-scale distribution systems. In this article, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we investigate how mobile sensor networks can be used for optimal event detection and localization in acyclic flow networks. We propose the idea of using sensors that move along the edges of the network and detect events (i.e., attacks). To localize the events, sensors detect proximity to beacons, which are devices with known placement in the network. We formulate the problem of minimizing the cost of monitoring infrastructure (i.e., minimizing the number of sensors and beacons deployed) in a predetermined zone of interest, while ensuring a degree of coverage by sensors and a required accuracy in locating events using beacons. We propose algorithms for solving the aforementioned problem and demonstrate their effectiveness with results obtained from a realistic flow network simulator.

Max-Min Optimality of Service Rate Control in Closed Queueing Networks

In this technical note, we discuss the optimality properties of service rate control in closed Jackson networks. We prove that when the cost function is linear to a particular service rate, the system performance is monotonic w.r.t. (with respect to) that service rate and the optimal value of that service rate can be either maximum or minimum (we call it Max-Min optimality); When the second-order derivative of the cost function w.r.t. a particular service rate is always positive (negative), which makes the cost function strictly convex (concave), the optimal value of such service rate for the performance maximization (minimization) problem can be either maximum or minimum. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most general result for the optimality of service rates in closed Jackson networks and all the previous works only involve the first conclusion. Moreover, our result is also valid for both the state-dependent and load-dependent service rates, under both the time-average and customer-average performance criteria.

M-burst: A framework of SRLG failure localization in all-optical networks

Fast and unambiguous failure localization for shared risk link groups (SRLGs) with multiple links is essential for building a fully survivable and functional transparent all-optical mesh network. Monitoring trails (m-trails) have been proposed as an effective approach to achieve this goal. However, each m-trail traverses through each link by constantly taking a wavelength channel, causing a significant amount of resource consumption. In this paper, a novel framework of all-optical monitoring for SRLG failure localization is proposed. We investigate the feasibility of periodically launching optical bursts along each m-trail instead of assigning it a dedicated supervisory lightpath to probe the set of fiber segments along the m-trail, aiming to achieve a graceful compromise between resource consumption and failure localization latency. This paper defines the proposed framework and highlights the relevant issues regarding its feasibility. We provide theoretical justifications of the scheme. Asa proof of concept, we formulate the optimal burst scheduling problem via an integer linear program (ILP) and implement the method in networks of all possible SRLGs with up to d = 3 links. A heuristic method is also proposed and implemented for multiple-link SRLG failure localization, keeping all the assumptions the same as in the ILP method. Numerical results for small networks show that the scheme is able to localize single-link and multiple-link SRLG failures unambiguously with a very small amount of failure localization latency.