Nagesh Nandiraju

Wireless Mesh Networks: Current Challenges and Future Directions of Web-In-The-Sky

Within the short span of a decade, Wi-Fi hotspots have revolutionized Internet service provisioning. With the increasing popularity and rising demand for more public Wi-Fi hotspots, network service providers are facing a daunting task. Wi-Fi hotspots typically require extensive wired infrastructure to access the backhaul network, which is often expensive and time consuming to provide in such situations. wireless mesh networks (WMNs) offer an easy and economical alternative for providing broadband wireless Internet connectivity and could be called the web-in-the-sky. In place of an underlying wired backbone, a WMN forms a wireless backhaul network, thus obviating the need for extensive cabling. They are based on multihop communication paradigms that dynamically form a connected network. However, multihop wireless communication is severely plagued by many limitations such as low throughput and limited capacity. In this article we point out key challenges that are impeding the rapid progress of this upcoming technology. We systematically examine each layer of the network and discuss the feasibility of some state-of-the-art technologies/protocols for adequately addressing these challenges. We also provide broader and deeper insight to many other issues that are of paramount importance for the successful deployment and wider acceptance of WMNs.

Multipath Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are envisioned to support the wired backbone with a wireless backbone for providing Internet connectivity to residential areas and offices. Routing protocols designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) primarily concentrate on finding a single best possible route to any destination out of the various paths available. However in wireless mesh networks, traffic is primarily routed either towards the Internet gateways (IGWs) or from the IGWs to the access points (APs). Thus, if multiple APs choose the best throughput path towards a gateway, the traffic loads on certain paths and mesh routers increases tremendously thereby deteriorating the overall performance of the network. To this end, we propose a novel multi-path hybrid routing protocol, multipath mesh (MMESH), that effectively discovers multiple paths. We also propose elegant traffic splitting algorithms for balancing traffic over these multiple paths to synergistically improve the overall performance. Through extensive simulations, we observe that our protocol works very well to cope with the variations in the network. Our protocol also improves the performance of flows traversing multiple hops

Achieving Load Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks Through Multiple Gateways

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are evolving to be the key technology of the future. As the WMNs are envisioned to provide high bandwidth broadband service to a large community of users, the Internet gateway (IGW) which acts as a central point of Internet attachment for the mesh routers, it is likely to be a potential bottleneck because of its limited wireless link capacity. We propose a novel technique that elegantly balances the load among the different IGWs in a WMN. We switch the point of attachment of an active source serviced gateway depending on the average queue length at the IGW. The proposed load balancing scheme includes: an initial gateway discovery module, which determines a primary gateway for a mesh router and a load balancing module that rebalances the load among the gateways. We use ns-2 for evaluating our proposed scheme and we observe that the proposed scheme is able to balance the traffic efficiently

Supporting MAC layer multicast in IEEE 802.11 based MANETs: issues and solutions

In IEEE 802.11 based mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) multicast packets are generally forwarded as one hop broadcast; mainly to reach all the multicast members in the neighborhood in a single transmission. Because of the broadcast property of the forwarding, packets suffer from increased instances of the hidden terminal problem. Mobility of nodes makes things more difficult, and unlike unicast transmissions where MAC can detect the movement of a nexthop by making several retries, it is not possible in case of multicast forwarding. To address these issues, we propose a multicast aware MAC protocol (MMP) for MANET. The basic objective of MMP is to provide a MAC layer support for multicast traffic. This is done by attaching an extended multicast header (EMH) by the multicast agent, which provides the address of the nexthop nodes that are supposed to receive the multicast packet. The MAC layer in MMP uses the EMH field to support an ACK based data delivery. After sending the data packet, the transmitter waits for the ACK from each of its destinations in a strictly sequential order. A retransmission of the multicast packet is performed only if the ACK from any of the nodes in EMH is missing. We compare MMP with IEEE 802.11 and results show that MMP substantially improves the performance of multicast packet delivery in MANET without creating much MAC overhead. In addition, MMP provides a better mechanism to detect the movement of its nexthop members.

Channel allocation and medium access control for wireless sensor networks

Recent developments in sensor technology, as seen in Berkeleys Mica2 Mote, Rockwells WINS nodes and the IEEE 802.15.4 Zigbee, have enabled support for single-transceiver, multi-channel communication. The task of channel assignment with minimum interference, also named as the 2-hop coloring problem, allows repetition of colors occurs only if the nodes are separated by more than 2 hops. Being NP complete, development of efficient heuristics for this coloring problem is an open research area and this paper proposes the Dynamic Channel Allocation (DCA) algorithm as a novel solution. Once channels are assigned, a Medium Access Control protocol must be devised so that channel selection, arbitration and scheduling occur with maximum energy savings and reduced message overhead, both critical considerations for sensor networks. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) development and analysis of the DCA algorithm that assigns optimally minimum channels in a distributed manner in order to make subsequent communication free from both primary and secondary interference and (2) proposing CMAC, a fully desynchronized multi-channel MAC protocol with minimum hardware requirements. CMAC takes into account the fundamental energy constraint in sensor nodes by placing them in a default sleep mode as far as possible, enables spatial channel re-use and ensures nearly collision free communication. Simulation results reveal that the DCA consumes significantly less energy while giving a legal distributed coloring. CMAC, our MAC protocol that leverages this coloring, has been thoroughly evaluated with various modes in SMAC, a recent protocol that achieves energy savings through coordinated sleeping. Results show that CMAC obtains nearly 200% reduction in energy consumption, significantly improved throughput, and end-to-end delay values that are 50-150% better than SMAC for our simulated topologies.

A novel queue management mechanism for improving performance of multihop flows in IEEE 802.11s based mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks exploit multi-hop wireless communications between access points to replace wired infrastructure. However, in multi-hop networks, effective bandwidth decreases with increasing number of hops, mainly due to increased spatial contention. Longer hop length flows suffer from extremely low throughputs which is highly undesirable in the envisioned scenarios for mesh networks. In this paper, we show that queue/buffer management, at intermediate relay mesh nodes, plays an important role in limiting the performance of longer hop length flows. We propose a novel queue management algorithm for IEEE 802.11s based mesh networks that improves the performance of multihop flows by fairly sharing the available buffer at each mesh point among all the active source nodes whose flows are being forwarded. Extensive simulations reveal that our proposed scheme substantially improves the performance of multihop flows. We also identify some important design issues that should be considered for the practical deployment of such mesh networks

CMAC - A multi-channel energy efficient MAC for wireless sensor networks

Tins paper presents CMAC, a fully desynchronized MAC protocol that is designed to exploit the existing multi-channel support in sensor nodes. The hardware requirements of our protocol are minimal, requiring a single half-duplex transceiver and a low-power wake-up radio. CMAC takes into account the fundamental energy constraint in sensor nodes by placing them in a default sleep mode and waking them up only when necessary. As a contrast to other dual radio wake-up schemes, our protocol focuses on how communication and its preceding control message exchange mechanism can be undertaken in a multi-channel scenario without assuming a separate control channel. CMAC enables spatial channel re-use, nearly collision free communication, and addresses the deafness problem without incurring a tradeoff in fairness or latency. When compared with a recent MAC protocol SMAC, results show that CMAC obtains nearly 200% reduction in energy consumption, significantly improved throughput, and end-to-end delay values that are 50-150% better than SMAC for our simulated topologies

Achieving Fairness in Wireless LANs by Enhanced IEEE 802.11 DCF

Over the past few years, wireless local area networks (WLANs) have gained an increased attention and a large number of WLANs are being deployed in universities, companies, airports etc. Majority of the IEEE 802.11 based WLANs employ distributed coordination function (DCF) in wireless access points (AP) to arbitrate the wireless channel among Wireless Stations (STAs). However, DCF poses serious unfairness problem between uplink and downlink flows. To overcome this unfairness problem, we propose a simple enhancement to the IEEE 802.11 DCF which provides priority to the AP and thus enables it to acquire a larger share of the channel when required. We have demonstrated the unfairness problem through systematic measurements in an experimental test bed of WLAN using the legacy 802.11 DCF. We also developed analytical models to calculate the throughput of AP and the STAs and verify these results through thorough simulations in ns-2. We observe that our simulation results find in good agreement with our analytical models. Results show that our proposed enhancement achieves a fair distribution of bandwidth and improves the throughput (by nearly 300%) for the downlink flows as compared to the DCF, without severely affecting the performance of uplink flows

Energy aware routing for spatio-temporal queries in sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks form an emerging technology that can significantly improve the quality of spatio-temporal data monitoring because of their untethered operation and potential for large scale deployment. We define a communication architecture that supports distributed query processing to evaluate spatio-temporal queries within the network. We represent these queries by query trees and distribute query operators to appropriate sensor nodes. As operator execution demands high computation capability, we propose the use of a heterogenous sensor network where query operators are assigned to sparsely deployed resource-rich nodes within a dense network of low power sensor nodes. We design an adaptive, decentralized, low communication overhead algorithm to determine an operator placement on the resource-rich nodes in the network to minimize cost of transmitting data along a routing tree constructed to retrieve data continuously at the sink from a set of spatially distributed geographical regions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to build an energy aware routing infrastructure to enable in-network processing of spatio-temporal queries.

Adaptive state-based multi-radio multi-channel multi-path routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are envisioned to seamlessly extend the network connectivity to end users by forming a wireless backbone that requires minimal infrastructure. Unfortunately for WMNs, frequent link quality fluctuations, excessive load on selective links, congestion, and limited capacity due to the half-duplex nature of radios are some key limiting factors that hinder their deployment. To address these problems, we propose a novel Adaptive State-based Multi-path Routing Protocol (ASMRP), which constructs Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) from each Mesh Router (MR) to Internet Gateways (IGWs) and effectively discovers multiple optimal path set between any given MR-IGW pair. A congestion aware traffic splitting algorithm to balance traffic over these multiple paths is presented which synergistically improves the overall performance of the WMNs. We design a novel Neighbor State Maintenance module that innovatively employs a state machine at each MR to monitor the quality of links connecting its neighbors in order to cope with unreliable wireless links. We also employ a 4-radio architecture for MRs, which allows them to communicate over multiple radios tuned to non-overlapping channels and better utilize the available spectrum. Through extensive simulations using ns-2, we observe that ASMRP substantially improves the achieved throughput (~5 times gain in comparison to AODV), and significantly minimizes end-to-end latencies. We also show that ASMRP ensures fairness in the network under varying traffic load conditions.