Stefan Rührup

Message-efficient beaconless georouting with guaranteed delivery in wireless sensor, ad hoc, and actuator networks

Beaconless georouting algorithms are fully reactive and work without prior knowledge of their neighbors. However, existing approaches can either not guarantee delivery or they require the exchange of complete neighborhood information. We describe two general methods for completely reactive face routing with guaranteed delivery. The beaconless forwarder planarization (BFP) scheme determines correct edges of a local planar subgraph without hearing from all neighbors. Face routing then continues properly. Angular relaying determines directly the next hop of a face traversal. Both schemes are based on the select-and-protest principle. Neighbors respond according to a delay function, but only if they do not violate a planar subgraph condition. Protest messages are used to remove falsely selected neighbors that are not in the planar subgraph. We show that a correct beaconless planar subgraph construction is not possible without protests. We also show the impact of the chosen planar subgraph on the message complexity. With the new circlunar neighborhood graph (CNG) we can bound the worst case message complexity of BFP, which is not possible when using the Gabriel graph (GG) for planarization. Simulation results show similar message complexities in the average case when using CNG and GG. Angular relaying uses a delay function that is based on the angular distance to the previous hop. We develop a theoretical framework for delay functions and show both theoretically and in simulations that with a function of angle and distance we can reduce the number of protests by a factor of 2 compared to a simple angle-based delay function.

Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are formed by small sensor nodes communicating over wireless links without using a fixed network infrastructure. Sensor nodes have a limited transmission range, and their processing and storage capabilities as well as their energy resources are also limited. Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks have to ensure reliable multi-hop communication under these conditions. We describe design challenges for routing protocols in sensor networks and illustrate the key techniques to achieve desired characteristics, such as energy efficiency and delivery guarantees. We give a survey of state-of-the-art routing techniques with a focus on geographic routing, a paradigm that enables a reactive message-efficient routing without prior route discovery or knowledge of the network topology. Different geographic routing strategies are described as well as beaconless routing techniques. We also show the physical layer impact on routing and outline further research directions.

Performance of distributed algorithms for topology control in wireless networks

We try to close the gap between theoretical investigations of wireless network topologies and realistic wireless environments. For point-to-point communication, we examine theoretically well-analyzed sparse graphs, i.e. the Yao-graph, the SparsY-graph, and the SymmY-graph. We present distributed algorithms that can be used to build up these graphs in time O(log n) per node without the use of any geographical positioning system. Our algorithms are based only on local knowledge and local decisions and make use of power control to establish communication links with low energy-cost. We compare these algorithms with respect to congestion, dilation, and energy. For congestion we introduce different measures that allow us to investigate the difference between real-world wireless networks and models for wireless communication at a high level of abstraction. For more realistic simulations we extend our simulation environment SAHNE. We use a realistic transmission model for directed communication that uses sector subdivision. Finally, our experimental results show that our topologies and algorithms work well in a distributed environment and we give some recommendations for the topology control based on our simulations.

Worst case mobility in ad hoc networks

We investigate distributed algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks for moving radio stations with adjustable transmission power in a worst case scenario. We consider two models to find a reasonable restriction on the worst-case mobility. In the pedestrian model we assume a maximum speed vmax of the radio stations, while in the vehicular model we assume a maximum acceleration amax of the points.Our goal is to maintain persistent routes with nice communication network properties like hop distance, energy-consumption, congestion and number of interferences. A route is persistent, if we can guarantee that all edges of this route can be uphold for a given time span Δ, which is a parameter denoting the minimum time the mobile network needs to adopt changes, i.e. update routing tables, change directory entries, etc. This Δ can be used as the length of an update interval for a proactive routing scheme.We extend some known notions such as transmission range, interferences, spanner, power spanner and congestion to both mobility models and introduce a new parameter called crowdedness that states a lower bound on the number of radio interferences. Then we prove that a mobile spanner hosts a path system that polylogarithmically approximates the optimal congestion.We present distributed algorithms based on a grid clustering technique and a high-dimensional representation of the dynamical start situation which construct mobile spanners with low congestion, low interference number, low energy-consumption, and low degree. We measure the optimality of the output of our algorithm by comparing it with the optimal choice of persistent routes under the same circumstances with respect to pedestrian or vehicular worst-case movements. Finally, we present solutions for dynamic position information management under our mobility models.

Optimizing Communication Overhead while Reducing Path Length in Beaconless Georouting with Guaranteed Delivery for Wireless Sensor Networks

Beaconless or contention-based geographic routing algorithms forward packets toward a geographical destination reactively without the knowledge of the neighborhood. Such algorithms allow greedy forwarding, where only the next hop neighbor responds after a timer-based contention using only three messages (RTS, CTS, and DATA) per forwarding step. However, existing contention-based schemes for recovery from greedy failures do not have this property. In this paper, we show that recovery is possible within this 3-message scheme: the Rotational Sweep (RS) algorithm directly identifies the next hop after timer-based contention and constructs a traversal path that ensures progress after a greedy failure. It uses a traversal scheme (called Sweep Circle) that forwards a message along the α-shape of the network and provides recovery paths shorter or equal to the prominent face routing with Gabriel graph planarization. An alternative traversal scheme (called Twisting Triangle) provides even shorter routes on average, as shown by simulations. They both also reduce per-node overall network contention delays. We prove that both traversal schemes guarantee delivery in unit disk graphs. Our traversal schemes avoid planarization and are easy to implement, based merely on the evaluation of a function of a neighbor nodes relative position. They can also be used for boundary detection and improve path-length in conventional beacon-based routing.

Optimized java binary and virtual machine for tiny motes

We have developed TakaTuka, a Java Virtual Machine optimized for tiny embedded devices such as wireless sensor motes. TakaTuka requires very little memory and processing power from the host device. This has been verified by successfully running TakaTuka on four different mote platforms. The focus of this paper is TakaTuka’s optimization of program memory usage. In addition, it also gives an overview of TakaTuka’s linkage with TinyOS and power management. TakaTuka optimizes storage requirements for the Java classfiles as well as for the JVM interpreter, both of which are expected to be stored on the embedded devices. These optimizations are performed on the desktop computer during the linking phase, before transferring the Java binary and the corresponding JVM interpreter onto a mote and thus without burdening its memory or computation resources. We have compared TakaTuka with the Sentilla, Darjeeling and Squawk JVMs.

DT-DYMO: Delay-Tolerant Dynamic MANET On-demand Routing

Communication in mobile ad hoc networks and intermittently connected networks usually requires multihop routing. While ad hoc routing protocols target the connection establishment in a changing environment, communication in intermittently connected networks requires end-to-end delivery without established connections. We present DT-DYMO, a combination of ad hoc routing based on the established Dynamic MANET On-demand Routing protocol and mechanisms for in-network storage and delivery likelihood prediction. DT-DYMO uses a route discovery mechanism in order to find the destination or nodes that are likely to be able to deliver the message in the future. We present simulation results for wireless network scenarios with high mobility and temporary network disconnection. The results show that we can significantly increase the delivery rate in mobile scenarios and thus can overcome the limitations of traditional ad hoc routing. On the other hand, DT-DYMO provides faster delivery than opportunistic message passing schemes that rely only on delivery likelihood estimation.

Paving the Way Towards Reactive Planar Spanner Construction in Wireless Networks

A spanner is a subgraph of a given graph that supports the original graph’s shortest path lengths up to a constant factor. Planar spanners and their distributed construction are of particular interest for geographic routing, which is an efficient localized routing scheme for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Planarity of the network graph is a key criterion for guaranteed delivery, while the spanner property supports efficiency in terms of path length. We consider the problem of reactive local spanner construction, where a node’s local topology is determined on demand. Known message-efficient reactive planarization algorithms do not preserve the spanner property, while reactive spanner constructions with a low message overhead have not been described so far. We introduce the concept of direct planarization which may be an enabler of efficient reactive spanner construction. Given an edge, nodes check for all incident intersecting edges a certain geometric criterion and withdraw the edge if this criterion is not satisfied. We use this concept to derive a generic reactive topology control mechanism and consider two geometric criteria. Simulation results show that direct planarization increases the performance of localized geographic routing by providing shorter paths than existing reactive approaches.

Competitive time and traffic analysis of position-based routing using a cell structure

We present a strategy for organizing the communication in wireless ad hoc networks based on a cell structure. We use the unit disk graph model and assume positioning capabilities for all nodes. The cell structure is an abstract view on the network and represents regions where nodes reside (node cells), regions that can be used for the communication flow (link cells) and regions that cannot be bridged due to the restricted transmission range (barrier cells). The cell structure helps to determine local minima for greedy forwarding and improves recovery from such minima, because for recovery all edges can be used in contrast to other topology-based rules that work only on a planar subgraph. For the analysis of position-based routing algorithms the measures time and traffic are based on the cell structure. The difficulty of exploring the network is expressed by the size of the barriers (number of cells in the perimeters). Exploration can be done in parallel, but with increasing traffic. We propose a comparative measure to assess both time and traffic, the combined comparative ratio, which is the maximum of the ratio of routing time and optimal time and the ratio of the traffic and the minimum exploration costs. While flooding and common single-path strategies have a linear ratio, we present a simple algorithm that has a sub-linear combined comparative ratio of O(/spl radic/h), where h is the minimal hop distance between source and target.

Online routing in faulty meshes with sub-linear comparative time and traffic ratio

We consider the problem of routing a message in a mesh network with faulty nodes. The number and positions of faulty nodes is unknown. It is known that a flooding strategy like expanding ring search can route a message in the minimum number of steps h while it causes a traffic (i.e. the total number of messages) of