Fengyuan Ren

EBRP: Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy is an extremely critical resource for battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSN), thus making energy-efficient protocol design a key challenging problem. Most of the existing energy-efficient routing protocols always forward packets along the minimum energy path to the sink to merely minimize energy consumption, which causes an unbalanced distribution of residual energy among sensor nodes, and eventually results in a network partition. In this paper, with the help of the concept of potential in physics, we design an Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol (EBRP) by constructing a mixed virtual potential field in terms of depth, energy density, and residual energy. The goal of this basic approach is to force packets to move toward the sink through the dense energy area so as to protect the nodes with relatively low residual energy. To address the routing loop problem emerging in this basic algorithm, enhanced mechanisms are proposed to detect and eliminate loops. The basic algorithm and loop elimination mechanism are first validated through extensive simulation experiments. Finally, the integrated performance of the full potential-based energy-balanced routing algorithm is evaluated through numerous simulations in a random deployed network running event-driven applications, the impact of the parameters on the performance is examined and guidelines for parameter settings are summarized. Our experimental results show that there are significant improvements in energy balance, network lifetime, coverage ratio, and throughput as compared to the commonly used energy-efficient routing algorithm.

Traffic-Aware Dynamic Routing to Alleviate Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks

The congestion problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is quite different from that in traditional networks. Most current congestion control algorithms try to alleviate the congestion by reducing the rate at which the source nodes inject packets into the network. However, this traffic control scheme always decreases the throughput so as to violate fidelity level required by the applications. In this paper, we present a solution that sufficiently exerts the idle or underloaded nodes to alleviate congestion and improve the overall throughput in WSNs. To achieve this goal, a traffic-aware dynamic routing (TADR) algorithm is proposed to route packets around the congestion areas and scatter the excessive packets along multiple paths consisting of idle and underloaded nodes. Utilizing the concept of potential in classical physics, our TADR algorithm is designed through constructing a hybrid virtual potential field using depth and normalized queue length to force the packets to steer clear of obstacles created by congestion and eventually move toward the sink. The simulation results show that the proposed solution improves the overall throughput by around 370 percent as compared to MintRoute, which is one of benchmark routing protocols. Furthermore, TADR scheme has low overhead suitable for large-scale, dense sensor networks.

Self-correcting time synchronization using reference broadcast in wireless sensor network

Time synchronization is one of the most fundamental services for numerous wireless sensor network applications. In this article the definition and basic concepts of time synchronization are introduced, and the related work is summarized in brief. Through analyzing the characteristics of the existing typical synchronization protocols and making a comprehensive comparison of the performance of various algorithms, we present a common guideline for designing the time synchronization protocol in WSN. Following this guideline, we develop a new time synchronization protocol called Self-Correcting Time Synchronization (SCTS), which converts the time synchronization problem into an online dynamic self-adjusting optimizing process to make the offset compensation and drift compensation simultaneously. The time and space complexities of the algorithm implementation are very low. In addition, the SCTS protocol fully exploits the inherent broadcast property of wireless channel, so the communication overhead is rather low. Because the algorithm implementation is based on the phase locked loop principle, an equivalent digital PLL without an actual voltage controlled oscillator is also proposed to avoid introducing the extra hardware required by a traditional PLL circuit. Finally, we validate SCTS on the Berkeley Mica2 experimental platform, and the performance is evaluated and compared to the existing typical time synchronization protocol.

Frequency-Domain Packet Scheduling for 3GPP LTE Uplink

In this paper, we investigate the frequency-domain packet scheduling (FDPS) problem for 3GPP LTE Uplink (UL). Instead of studying a specific scheduling policy, we provide a unified approach to tackle this issue. First we formalize a general LTE UL FDPS problem which is suitable for various scheduling policies. Then we prove that the problem is MAX SNP-hard, which implies that approximation algorithms with constant approximation ratios are the best that we can hope for. Therefore we design two approximation algorithms, both of which have polynomial runtime. Subsequently, we analyze the two algorithms and find their approximation ratios. The first algorithm is easy to follow, since it is based on a simple greedy method. The second one is based on the local ratio technique and it can approximately solve the LTE UL FDPS problem with a approximation ratio of 2.

Modeling and understanding TCP incast in data center networks

Recently, TCP incast problem attracts increasing attention since the receiver suffers drastic goodput drop when it simultaneously strips data over multiple servers. Lots of attempts have been made to address the problem through experiments and simulations. However, to the best of our knowledge, few solutions can solve it fundamentally at low cost. In this paper, a goodput model of TCP incast is built to understand why goodput collapse occurs. We conclude that TCP incast goodput deterioration is mainly caused by two types of timeouts, one happens at the tail of a data block and dominates the goodput when the number of senders is small, while the other one at the head of a data block and governs the goodput when the number of senders is large. The proposed model describes the causes of these two types of timeouts which are related to the incast communication pattern, block size, bottleneck buffer and so on. We validate the proposed model by comparing with simulation data, finding that it can well characterize the features of TCP incast. We also discuss the impact of most parameters on the goodput of TCP incast.

Attribute-Aware Data Aggregation Using Potential-Based Dynamic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

The resources especially energy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are quite limited. Since sensor nodes are usually much dense, data sampled by sensor nodes have much redundancy, data aggregation becomes an effective method to eliminate redundancy, minimize the number of transmission, and then to save energy. Many applications can be deployed in WSNs and various sensors are embedded in nodes, the packets generated by heterogenous sensors or different applications have different attributes. The packets from different applications cannot be aggregated. Otherwise, most data aggregation schemes employ static routing protocols, which cannot dynamically or intentionally forward packets according to network state or packet types. The spatial isolation caused by static routing protocol is unfavorable to data aggregation. To make data aggregation more efficient, in this paper, we introduce the concept of packet attribute, defined as the identifier of the data sampled by different kinds of sensors or applications, and then propose an attribute-aware data aggregation (ADA) scheme consisting of a packet-driven timing algorithm and a special dynamic routing protocol. Inspired by the concept of potential in physics and pheromone in ant colony, a potential-based dynamic routing is elaborated to support an ADA strategy. The performance evaluation results in series of scenarios verify that the ADA scheme can make the packets with the same attribute spatially convergent as much as possible and therefore improve the efficiency of data aggregation. Furthermore, the ADA scheme also offers other properties, such as scalable with respect to network size and adaptable for tracking mobile events.

Retransmission or Redundancy: Transmission Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks

As an application-driven network, wireless sensor network generally requires high data reliability to maintain detection and response capabilities. Although two approaches, which are retransmission and redundancy, have been proposed to enhance data reliability, the theoretical work is required to evaluate their impact on transmission reliability and energy efficiency. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive theoretical study on the packet arrival probability and average energy consumption for both approaches. Our analysis indicates that when loss probability remains low or moderate, erasure coding, a scheme based on redundancy, is more reliable and energy efficient than retransmission. However, the performance of erasure coding would largely deteriorate under high packet loss condition. We also demonstrate that its resistance capability against packet loss weakens as hop number increases. Furthermore, with the increase in redundancy, erasure coding has to sacrifice the advantage of energy efficiency for reliability.

A robust active queue management algorithm in large delay networks

Active Queue Management (AQM) can maintain smaller queuing delay and higher throughput by purposefully dropping the packets at intermediate nodes. Almost all the existing AQM schemes neglect the impact of large delay on their performance. In this study, we first show an unexpected fact through simulation experiments, which is the dramatic oscillations appear in the queues controlled by several popular AQM schemes, including RED, PI controller and REM, in large delay networks. With appropriate model approximation, we design a robust AQM controller to compensate for the delay using the principle of internal mode compensation in control theory. Our novel algorithm restrains the negative effect on queue stability caused by large delay. Simulation results show that the integrated performance of the proposed algorithm outperforms that of several well-known schemes when the connections have large delay, while keeping buffer queue short.

Performance Equivalent Analysis of Workflow Systems Based on Stochastic Petri Net Models

Performance analysis is one of the most important aspects in workflow management system. In this paper, we propose the stochastic Petri nets workflow model (WF-SPN), which is the extension of WF-net. Based on our model, we give four performance equivalent formulae for four basic routing pattern of workflow system. Then, we put forward an approximate performance analysis method on the base of our performance equivalent formulae. An example illustrates our method can solve real-world problems efficiently.

A-ADHOC: An Adaptive Real-time Distributed MAC Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) are the foundation of Intelligent Traffic System (ITS), and recently many MAC protocols for VANET are proposed, among which a reliable MAC protocol called ADHOC has aroused much attention. By investigating the details of ADHOC protocol, we have discovered several unsolved problems that might lead to network failure. In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of the success probability for contending nodes and prove that an adaptive frame length is quite necessary. We propose Adaptive-ADHOC (A-ADHOC) MAC protocol, which implements a robust mechanism supporting the adaptive frame length. Evaluation result shows that A-ADHOC can maintain a high contending success probability and obtain about 50% reduction of response time over original ADHOC protocol, while providing important enhancement on network scalability and robustness.