This paper reports on the first systematic study of congestion-aware routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks to achieve an improved end-end delay performance. In particular, we compare 802.11 compatible implementations of a set of congestion-aware routing protocols against our implementation of state of the art shortest path routing protocol (SRCR). We implement congestion-aware routing algorithms Backpressure (BP), Enhanced-Backpressure (E-BP) adapted from [1], [2] suitably adjusted for 802.11 implementation. We then propose and implement Congestion Diversity Protocol (CDP) adapted from [3] recognizing the limitations of BP and E-BP for 802.11-based wireless networks. SRCR solely utilizes link qualities, while BP relies on queue differential to route packets. CDP and E-BP rely on distance metrics which take into account queue backlogs and link qualities in the network. E-BP computes its metric by summing the ETX and queue differential, while CDP determines its metric by calculating the least draining time to the destination. Our small testbed consisting of twelve 802.11g nodes enables us to empirically compare the performance of congestion-aware routing protocols (BP, E-BP and CDP) against benchmark SRCR. For medium to high load UDP traffic, we observe that CDP exhibits significant improvement with respect to both end-end delay and throughput over other protocols with no loss of performance for TCP traffic. Backpressure-based routing algorithms (BP and E-BP) show poorer performance for UDP and TCP traffic. Finally, we carefully study the effects of the modular approach to congestion-aware routing design in which the MAC layer is left intact
Congestions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) could potentially cause packet loss, throughput impairment and energy waste. To address this issue, a hop-by-hop cross-layer congestion control scheme (HCCC) built on contention-based MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. According to MAC-layer channel information including buffer occupancy ratio and congestion degree of local node, HCCC dynamically adjusts channel access priority in MAC layer and data transmission rate of the node to tackle the problem of congestion. Simulations have been conducted to compare HCCC against closely-related existi…
In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), a channel assignment has to balance the objectives of maintaining connectivity and increasing the aggregate bandwidth. The main aim of the channel assignment algorithm is to assign the channels to the network interfaces, from the given expected load on each virtual link. From the existing work done so far, we can examine that there is no combined solution of multi-channel assignment with routing and congestion control. In this paper, we propose a congestion control routing protocol along with multi-channel assignment. We use a traffic aware metric in this proto…
In Heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) congestion occurs with limited resources. Due to the shared wireless channel and dynamic topology, packet transmissions suffer from interference and fading. In heterogeneous ad hoc networks, throughput via a given route is depending on the minimum data rate of all its links. In a route of links with various data rates, if a high data rate node forwards more traffic to a low data rate node, there is a chance of congestion, which leads to long queuing delays in such routes. Since hop count is used as a routing metric in traditional routing, it do …
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant reliable transport protocol utilized in the Internet. Improving the performance of TCP associated with the presence of multi-hop is one of the research challenges in wireless mesh networks. Wireless mesh networks have large round trip time variations and these variations are dependent on the number of hops. In wireless mesh network, when congestion loss and wireless loss are co-existed the number of packets dropped increases and will have adverse effects on TCP and its congestion control mechanism which leads to low throughput. Here we have d…
This paper focuses on the delay induced Hopf bifurcation in a dual model of Internet congestion control algorithms which can be modeled as a time-delay system described by a one-order delay differential equation (DDE). By choosing communication delay as the bifurcation parameter, we demonstrate that the system loses its stability and a Hopf bifurcation occurs when communication delay passes through a critical value. Moreover, the bifurcating periodic solution of system is calculated by means of perturbation methods. Discussion of stability of the periodic solutions involves the computation of …
Data centers traffic is composed by numerous latency-sensitive "mice" flows, which is consisted of only several packets, and a few throughput-sensitive "elephant" flows, which occupy more than 80% of overall load. Generally, the short-lived "mice" flows induce transient congestion and the long-lived "elephant" flows cause persistent congestion. The network congestion is a major performance inhibitor. Conventionally, the hop-by-hop and end-to-end flow control mechanisms are employed to relief transient and persistent congestion, respectively. However, in face of the mixture of elephants and mic…
A new era in wireless sensor network technology has been ushered in through the introduction of multimedia sensor networks, which has a major bottleneck in the form of network congestion. Congestion occurs when resources are in high demand during the active period while the data processing and transmission speeds lag behind the speed of the incoming traffic. This may disrupt normal network operations by buffer overflow, packet loss, increased latency, excessive energy consumption and even worse, a collapse of the entire operation. In this paper we propose a novel Trust Integrated Congestion-aw…
In Multi-Radio Multi-Channel (MRMC) Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), Partially Overlapped Channels (POC) has been used to increase the parallel transmission. But adjacent channel interference is very severe in MRMC environment; it decreases the network throughput very badly. In this paper, we propose a Coefficient of Restitution based Cross layer Interference aware Routing protocol (CoRCiaR) to improve TCP performance in Wireless Mesh Networks. This approach comprises of two-steps: Initially, the interference detection algorithm is developed at MAC layer by enhancing the RTS/CTS method. Based on …
In a dense Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation, using a centralized algorithm for minimum-delay routing would incur significant signaling and computational overhead. In this work, we exploit the deterministic topology of the constellation to calculate the minimum-delay path between any two nodes in a satellite network. We propose a distributed probabilistic congestion control scheme to minimize end-to-end delay, which is built on top of the existing Datagram Routing Algorithm (DRA). The decision to route packets is taken based on the latest traffic information received from neighbour…
Standard congestion control cannot detect link failure losses which occur due to mobility and power scarcity in multi-hop Ad-Hoc network (MANET). Moreover, successive executions of Back-off algorithm deficiently grow Retransmission Timeout (RTO) exponentially for new route. The importance of detecting and responding link failure losses is to prevent sender from remaining idle unnecessarily and manage number of packet retransmission overhead. In contrast to Cross-layer approaches which require feedback information from lower layers, this paper operates purely in Transport layer. This paper expl…
Caching can be leveraged to significantly improve network performance and mitigate congestion. However, characterizing the optimal tradeoff between routing cost and cache deployment cost remains an open problem. In this paper, for a network with arbitrary topology and congestion-dependent nonlinear cost functions, we aim to jointly determine the cache deployment, content placement, and hop-by-hop routing strategies, so that the sum of routing cost and cache deployment cost is minimized. We tackle this NP-hard problem starting with a fixed-routing setting, and then to a general dynamic-routing …
In this paper, we consider the problem of modelling the average delay in an IEEE 802.11 DCF wireless mesh network with a single root node under light traffic. We derive expression for mean delay for a co-located wireless mesh network, when packet generation is homogeneous Poisson process with rate λ. We also show how our analysis can be extended for non-homogeneous Poisson packet generation. We model mean delay by decoupling queues into independent M/M/1 queues. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the analytical results.
In mobile adhoc networks, congestion occurs with limited resources. The standard TCP congestion control mechanism is not able to handle the special properties of a shared wireless channel. TCP congestion control works very well on the Internet. But mobile adhoc networks exhibit some unique properties that greatly affect the design of appropriate protocols and protocol stacks in general, and of congestion control mechanism in particular. As it turned out, the vastly differing environment in a mobile adhoc network is highly problematic for standard TCP. Many approaches have been proposed to over…
Identifying the occurrence of congestion in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a major task. The inbuilt congestion control techniques of existing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) designed for wired networks do not handle the unique properties of shared wireless multi-hop link. There are several approaches proposed for detecting and overcoming the congestion in the mobile ad-hoc network. In this paper we present a Modified AD-hoc Transmission Control Protocol (M-ADTCP) method where the receiver detects the probable current network status and transmits this information to the sender as feedb…
In this paper we design and implement a resource management scheme based on cooperative association, where the STAs can share useful information in order to improve the performance of the association/handoff procedures. The cooperative association mechanism is inspired by the rapidly designed cooperative protocols in the field of wireless networks. Furthermore, we introduce a load balancing mechanism that operates in a cross-layer manner taking into account uplink and downlink channel conditions, routing performance and congestion control. The iterative heuristic algorithms that we propose, co…
In recent years, a significant amount of research has been conducted to explore the benefits of network coding in different scenarios, from both theoretical and simulation perspectives. In this paper, we utilize queueing theory to propose an analytical framework for bidirectional unicast flows in multi-hop wireless mesh networks, and study throughput of inter-flow network coding. We analytically determine performance metrics such as the probability of successful transmission in terms of collision probability, and feedback mechanism and retransmission. Regarding the coding process, our model us…
Satellite networks are booming to provide high-speed and low latency Internet access, but the transport layer becomes one of the main obstacles. Legacy end-to-end TCP is designed for terrestrial networks, not suitable for error-prone, propagation delay varying, and intermittent satellite links. It is necessary to make a clean-slate design for the satellite transport layer. This paper introduces a novel Information-centric Hop-by-Hop transport layer design, INTCP. It carries out hop-by-hop packets retransmission and hop-by-hop congestion control with the help of cache and request-response model…
Cooperative inter-vehicular applications rely on the exchange of broadcast single-hop status messages among vehicles, called beacons. The aggregated load on the wireless channel due to periodic beacons can prevent the transmission of other types of messages, what is called channel congestion due to beaconing activity. In this paper we approach the problem of controlling the beaconing rate on each vehicle by modeling it as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem. This allows us to formally apply the notion of fairness of a beaconing rate allocation in vehicular networks and to control the …
The throughput efficiency of a wireless mesh network with potentially malicious external or internal interference can be significantly improved by equipping routers with multi-radio access over multiple channels. For reliably mitigating the effect of interference, frequency diversity (e.g., channel hopping) and time diversity (e.g., carrier sense multiple access) are conventionally leveraged to schedule communication channels. However, multi-radio scheduling over a limited set of channels to minimize the effect of interference and maximize network performance in the presence of concurrent netw…
In this paper, we analyze some local stability and local bifurcation properties of the Proportionally fair, TCP fair, and the Delay-based dual algorithms in the presence of two distinct time delays. In particular, our focus is on the interplay between different notions of fairness, stability, and bifurcation theoretic properties. Different notions of fairness give rise to different non-linear models for the class of Dual algorithms. One can devise conditions for local stability, for each of these models, but such conditions do not offer clear design recommendations on which fairness criteria i…
Network coding and opportunistic routing are two recognized innovative ideas to improve the performance of wireless networks by utilizing the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. In the last decade, there has been considerable research on how to synergize inter-flow network coding and opportunistic routing in a single joint protocol outperforming each in any scenario. This paper explains the motivation behind the integration of these two techniques, and highlights certain scenarios in which the joint approach may even degrade the performance, emphasizing the fact that their synergistic eff…
We consider the problem of designing a packet-level congestion control and scheduling policy for datacenter networks. Current datacenter networks primarily inherit the principles that went into the design of Internet, where congestion control and scheduling are distributed. While distributed architecture provides robustness, it suffers in terms of performance. Unlike Internet, data center is fundamentally a "controlled" environment. This raises the possibility of designing a centralized architecture to achieve better performance. Recent solutions such as Fastpass and Flowtune have provided the…
Wireless Mesh Networks improve their capacities by equipping mesh nodes with multi-radios tuned to non-overlapping channels. Hence the data forwarding between two nodes has multiple selections of links and the bandwidth between the pair of nodes varies dynamically. Under this condition, a mesh node adopts machine learning mechanisms to choose the possible best next hop which has maximum bandwidth when it intends to forward data. In this paper, we present a machine learning based forwarding algorithm to let a forwarding node dynamically select the next hop with highest potential bandwidth capac…
Adaptive routing algorithm has been employed in multichip interconnection networks in order to improve network performance. Does a algorithm use local or global network state? This is the key question in adaptive routing. In many traffic patterns, the ignorance of global network state, leading to routing selection based only on local congestion information, tends to violate global load balance. To attack the load balance issue in adapting routing, some global adaptive routing algorithms introduce a congestion propagation network to obtain global network status information, such as Regional Con…
Quality of Service provisioning is one of the major design goals of IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. In order to provide quality delivery of delay sensitive services such as voice, video etc., it is required to route such traffic over a minimum delay path. In this paper we propose a routing metric for delay sensitive services in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. We design a new cross layer routing metric, namely Expected Scheduler Delay (ESD), based on HoldOff exponent and the current load at each node of the network. This proposed metric takes into account the expected theoretical end-to-end delay of rout…
A few months ago, the BitTorrent developers announced that the transfer of torrent data in the official client was about to switch to uTP, an application-layer congestion-control protocol using UDP at the transport-layer. This announcement immediately raised an unmotivated buzz about a new, imminent congestion collapse of the whole Internet. Though this reaction was not built on solid technical foundation, nevertheless a legitimate question remains: i.e., whether this novel algorithm is a necessary building block for future Internet applications, or whether it may result in an umpteenth additi…
This study explores the throughput and delay that can be achieved by various forwarding schemes employing multiple paths and different degrees of redundancy focusing on linear network coding. The key contribution of the study is an analytical framework for modeling the throughput and delay for various schemes considering wireless mesh networks where, unicast traffic is forwarded and hop-by-hop retransmissions are employed for achieving reliability. The analytical framework is generalized for an arbitrary number of paths and hops per path. Another key contribution of the study is the evaluation…
We consider the problem of routing packets across a multi-hop network consisting of multiple sources of traffic and wireless links while ensuring bounded expected delay. Each packet transmission can be overheard by a random subset of receiver nodes among which the next relay is selected opportunistically. The main challenge in the design of minimum-delay routing policies is balancing the trade-off between routing the packets along the shortest paths to the destination and distributing traffic according to the maximum backpressure. Combining important aspects of shortest path and backpressure r…
Supporting real-time communications over Wireless networks (WSNs) is a tough challenge, due to packet collisions and the non-determinism of common channel access schemes like CSMA/CA. Real-time WSN communication is even more problematic in the general case of multi-hop mesh networks. For this reason, many real-time WSN solutions are limited to simple topologies, such as star networks. We propose a real-time multi-hop WSN MAC protocol built atop the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. By relying on precise clock synchronization and constructive interference-based flooding, the proposed MAC builds a c…
We present the TDMH (Time Deterministc Multi-Hop) protocol, a complete stack for real-time wireless mesh networks. TDMH offers to applications a connection-oriented, bounded-latency communication model. Point-to-point data streams can be created and destroyed at any time. Path redundancy can be optionally introduced to improve reliability. TDMH exploits state-of-the-art low power clock synchronisation and constructive interference flooding to build a continuously updated graph of the network topology, onto which a centralized scheduler maps data streams using TDMA channel access. We realised T…
This dissertation is a study on the design and analysis of novel, optimal routing and rate control algorithms in wireless, mobile communication networks. Congestion control and routing algorithms upto now have been designed and optimized for wired or wireless mesh networks. In those networks, optimal algorithms (optimal in the sense that either the throughput is maximized or delay is minimized, or the network operation cost is minimized) can be engineered based on the classic time scale decomposition assumption that the dynamics of the network are either fast enough so that these algorithms es…
In this paper we study information flow paths in a data network, where traffic generated by servers (or sources) takes a multi-hop path in order to reach its clients (destinations). Each node in the middle of this multi-hop path should route the incoming traffic and the traffic generated by itself to the next hop in such a way that the traffic reaches its destination while avoiding congestion in the links. For simplicity, we will assume the network only carries single commodity traffic, i.e., all of the traffic should be routed to a single destination.
The innovative services empowered by the Internet of Things (IoT) require a seamless and reliable wireless infrastructure that enables communications within heterogeneous and dynamic low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). The Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) was designed to meet the communication requirements of a wide range of IoT application domains. However, a load balancing problem exists in RPL under heavy traffic-load scenarios, degrading the network performance in terms of delay and packet delivery. In this paper, we tackle the problem of load-balancing in RPL networks using a reinforcemen…
We develop distributed algorithms to allocate resources in multi-hop wireless networks with the aim of minimizing total cost. In order to observe the fundamental duplexing constraint that co-located transmitters and receivers cannot operate simultaneously on the same frequency band, we first devise a spectrum allocation scheme that divides the whole spectrum into multiple sub-bands and activates conflict-free links on each sub-band. We show that the minimum number of required sub-bands grows asymptotically at a logarithmic rate with the chromatic number of network connectivity graph. A simple …
Wireless connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT) requires combining low latency and high reliability with power and cost constraints. On top of that, diverse applications and end-to-end services with very different performance requirements should ideally share the same network infrastructure. Software defined networks (SDN) were defined to allow this coexistence, but they have seen very limited adoption in IoT systems due to the inherent resource constrained nature of the wireless devices. Additionally, the low-power nature of IoT communication standards does not usually allow for physic…
Citizens develop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) in many areas as an alternative or their only way for local interconnection and access to the Internet. This access is often achieved through the use of several shared web proxy gateways. These network infrastructures consist of heterogeneous technologies and combine diverse routing protocols. Network-aware state-of-art proxy selection schemes for WMNs do not work in this heterogeneous environment. We developed a client-side gateway selection mechanism that optimizes the client-gateway selection, agnostic to underlying infrastructure and protocols,…
We present a study of transport on complex networks with routing based on local information. Particles hop from one node of the network to another according to a set of routing rules with different degrees of congestion awareness, ranging from random diffusion to rigid congestion-gradient driven flow. Each node can be either source or destination for particles and all nodes have the same routing capacity, which are features of ad-hoc wireless networks. It is shown that the transport capacity increases when a small amount of congestion awareness is present in the routing rules, and that it then…
Recent literature has proved that stable dynamic routing algorithms have solid theoretical foundation that makes them suitable to be implemented in a real protocol, and used in practice in many different operational network contexts. Such algorithms inherit much of the properties of congestion controllers implementing one of the possible combination of AQM/ECN schemes at nodes and flow control at sources. In this paper we propose a linear program formulation of the multi-commodity flow problem with congestion control, under max-min fairness, comprising demands with or without exogenous peak ra…
Wireless mesh networks are a promising technology for connecting sensors and actuators with high flexibility and low investment costs. In industrial applications, however, reliability is essential. Therefore, two time-slotted medium access methods, DSME and TSCH, were added to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. They allow collision-free communication in multi-hop networks and provide channel hopping for mitigating external interferences. The slot schedule used in these networks is of high importance for the network performance. This paper supports the development of efficient schedules by providing a…
Mobile devices have shown to be very useful during and post disaster. If the communication infrastructure breaks down, however, they become almost useless as most services rely on Internet connectivity. Building post-disaster networks based purely on smartphones remains a challenging task, and, as of today, no practical solutions exist. The rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) offers the possibility to improve this situation. With an increase in smart spaces such as smart homes and smart offices, we move towards digital cities that are deeply penetrated by IoT technology. Many IoT devices …
The Internet can be made more efficient and robust with hop-by-hop multipath routing: Each router on the path can split packets between multiple nexthops in order to 1) avoid failed links and 2) reduce traffic on congested links. Before deciding how to split traffic, one first needs to decide which nexthops to allow at each step. In this paper, we investigate the requirements and trade-offs for making this choice. Most related work chooses the viable nexthops by applying the "Downward Criterion", i.e., only adding nexthops that lead closer to the destination; or more generally by creating a Di…
Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi hop low cost, with easy maintenance robust network providing reliable service coverage. WMNs consist of mesh routers and mesh clients. In this architecture, while static mesh routers form the wireless backbone, mesh clients access the network through mesh routers as well as directly meshing with each other. Different from traditional wireless networks, WMN is dynamically self-organized and self-configured. In other words, the nodes in the mesh network automatically establish and maintain network connectivity. Over the years researchers have worked, to red…
Effective congestion control for data center networks is becoming increasingly challenging with a growing amount of latency sensitive traffic, much fatter links, and extremely bursty traffic. Widely deployed algorithms, such as DCTCP and DCQCN, are still far from optimal in many plausible scenarios, particularly for tail latency. Many operators compensate by running their networks at low average utilization, dramatically increasing costs. In this paper, we argue that we have reached the practical limits of end-to-end congestion control. Instead, we propose, implement, and evaluate a new conges…
Even though channel assignment has been studied for years, the performance of most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop wireless networks such as wireless sensor network (WSN), wireless mesh network (WMN), mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is limited by channel interference. Properly assigning orthogonal channels to wireless links can improve the throughput of multi-hop networks. To solve the dynamic channel assignment problem, a routing-based channel assignment algorithm called R-CA is proposed. R-CA can allocate channels for wireless nodes when needed and free channels after data transmission. Thus more …
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to the space arena, also known as non-terrestrial networks. Several IoT satellite applications for tracking ships and cargo can be seen as exemplary cases of intermittent transmission of updates whose main performance parameter is the information freshness. This paper analyzes the Age of Information (AoI) of a satellite network with multiple sources and destinations that are very distant and therefore require several consecutive multi-hop transmissions. A packet erasure channel and different queueing polic…
Network architectures that can efficiently transport high quality, multicast video are rapidly becoming a basic requirement of emerging multimedia applications. The main problem complicating multicast video transport is variation in network bandwidth constraints. An attractive solution to this problem is to use an adaptive, multi-layered video encoding mechanism. In this paper, we consider two such mechanisms for the support of video multicast; one is a rate-based mechanism that relies on explicit rate congestion feedback from the network, and the other is a credit-based mechanism that relies …
