In this work, we consider latency in wireless networks, motivated by the need for reliable and low-latency wireless communication for applications such as vehicle-to-vehicle communication and industrial automation. The environment that these applications operate in is often highly dynamic, and, as a result, the wireless network technology used needs to be able to adapt to changing conditions, which makes mesh networking a good fit. Hence, in this work, we consider Thread and Bluetooth Mesh, two prominent mesh networking technologies. We measure one-way point-to-point latency using these technologies and show the cumulative probability distribution of the latency for varying payload size. We carry out the measurements under static conditions in an open-air environment. Our results show that Thread achieves lower latency than Bluetooth Mesh, especially for larger payloads. Furthermore, we show that Thread meets some of the latency targets set out for 5G. However, since Thread networks are slow to adapt to network changes, Thread may still not be suitable for application requiring low latency. Bluetooth mesh, on the other hand, does not meet any of the latency targets, although it is close when the payload is small (less than 11 bytes). Overall, there needs to be further optimization before these technologies can be used for reliable and low-latency communication in dynamic environments.
We propose a mechanism to support URLLC Open-RAN ultra-low latency over a MESH-PON, serving dense deployment of small cell and MEC nodes in an access network. We show the possibility, under given assumptions, to achieve application-to-application end-to-end latency below 1ms.
As progressive densification of cells, deployment of Cloud-RAN and \ac{MEC} are coming into reality to support the ultra-low latency with high reliability in 5G and beyond, it generates mesh traffic pattern across fronthaul network. This led to evolution of PON architectural enhancements with virtualization in order to support such mesh traffic pattern. However, allocation of virtual PON slices dynamically over such mesh-PON based fronthaul transport is becoming a research challenge. In this paper, we provide a mixed analytical-iterative model to compute optimal virtual PON slice allocation, p…
Ultra-low end-to-end latency is one of the most important requirements in 5G networks and beyond to support latency-critical applications. Cloud-RAN and MEC are considered as the key driving technology that can help reduce end-to-end latency. However, the use of MEC nodes poses radical changes to the access network architecture. As it brings the processing and the networking services closer to the edge, it often requires network functions (for example, the CU/DU stack and the application processing) to be distributed across different MEC sites. Therefore, a novel transport mechanism is needed …
5G Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications Technology (URLLC) will not be able to provide extremely reliable low latency services to the complex networks in 6G. Moreover, URLLC that began with 5G has to be refined and improved in 6G to provide xURLCC (extreme URLCC) with sub-millisecond latency, for supporting diverse mission-critical applications. This paper aims to highlight the importance of peer-to-peer mesh connectivity for services that require xURLLC. Deploying mesh connectivity among RAN nodes would add significant value to the current 5G New Radio (5G NR) enabling 6G to increase fle…
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging wireless technology created for short-range control and monitoring applications that is becoming increasingly widespread among the Internet of Things (IoT) services because of its low-cost and low-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel neighbor discovery scheme and failure recovery techniques for multi-path and single-path low-power and reliable BLE networks. By exploiting energy-efficient access control and fast and robust routing ideas with adaptive failure recovery, the proposed methods outperform the well-known flooding approach used…
Service meshes play a central role in the modern application ecosystem by providing an easy and flexible way to connect different services that form a distributed application. However, because of the way they interpose on application traffic, they can substantially increase application latency and resource consumption. We develop a decompositional approach and a tool, called MeshInsight, to systematically characterize the overhead of service meshes and to help developers quantify overhead in deployment scenarios of interest. Using MeshInsight, we confirm that service meshes can have high overh…
In this paper, we adopt a new noisy wireless network model introduced very recently by Censor-Hillel et al. in [ACM PODC 2017, CHHZ17]. More specifically, for a given noise parameter $p\in [0,1],$ any sender has a probability of $p$ of transmitting noise or any receiver of a single transmission in its neighborhood has a probability $p$ of receiving noise. In this paper, we first propose a new asymptotically latency-optimal approximation algorithm (under faultless model) that can complete single-message broadcasting task in $D+O(\log^2 n)$ time units/rounds in any WMN of size $n,$ and diameter …
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…
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…
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…
The problem of placement of mesh router nodes in Wireless Mesh Networks is known to be a NP hard problem. In this paper, the problem is addressed under a constraint of network model tied to rural regions where we usually observe low density and sparse population. We consider the area to cover as decomposed into a set of elementary areas which can be required or optional in terms of coverage and where a node can be placed or not. We propose an effective algorithm to ensure the coverage. This algorithm is based on metropolis approach. We evaluated the proposed algorithm on an instance network. A…
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) consist of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology for serving wireless mesh clients to communicate with one another or to connect to the Internet. Nodes in a mesh network can communicate with each other either directly or through one or more intermediate nodes, similar to social networks. WMNs share many common properties with social networks. We first identify the differences and similarities between social networks and WMNs and then use metrics that are typically used for social network analysis (SNA) to assess real WMNs. Analyzing real WMN data collected from…
In multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) WMNs, interference alleviation is affected through several network design techniques e.g., channel assignment (CA), link scheduling, routing etc., intelligent CA schemes being the most effective tool for interference mitigation. CA in WMNs is an NP-Hard problem, and makes optimality a desired yet elusive goal in real-time deployments which are characterized by fast transmission and switching times and minimal end-to-end latency. The trade-off between optimal performance and minimal response times is often achieved through CA schemes that employ heuristics to…
Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate internet access and make connecting to the Internet not only easy, but affordable too. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory, quantify its performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless …
Performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in terms of network capacity, end-to-end latency, and network resilience depends upon the prevalent levels of interference. Thus, interference alleviation is a fundamental design concern in multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) WMNs, and is achieved through a judicious channel assignment (CA) to the radios in a WMN. In our earlier works we have tried to address the problem of estimating the intensity of interference in a wireless network and predicting the performance of CA schemes based on the measure of the interference estimate. We have proposed relia…
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…
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 this paper we build upon the recent observation that the 802.11 rate region is log-convex and, for the first time, characterise max-min fair rate allocations for a large class of 802.11 wireless mesh networks. By exploiting features of the 802.11e/n MAC, in particular TXOP packet bursting, we are able to use this characterisation to establish a straightforward, practically implementable approach for achieving max-min throughput fairness. We demonstrate that this approach can be readily extended to encompass time-based fairness in multi-rate 802.11 mesh networks.
Autonomous vehicles are expected to emerge as a main trend in vehicle development over the next decade. To support autonomous vehicles, ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) is required between autonomous vehicles and infrastructure networks, e.g., fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. Hence, reliability and latency must be jointly investigated in 5G autonomous vehicular networks. Utilizing the Euclidean norm theory, we first propose a reliability and latency joint function to evaluate the joint impact of reliability and latency in 5G autonomous vehicular networks. The interacti…
Multi-channel multi-interface Wireless Mesh Networks permit to spread the load across orthogonal channels to improve network capacity. Although broadcast is vital for many layer-3 protocols, proposals for taking advantage of multiple channels mostly focus on unicast transmissions. In this paper, we propose broadcast algorithms that fit any channel and interface assignment strategy. They guarantee that a broadcast packet is delivered with a minimum probability to all neighbors. Our simulations show that the proposed algorithms efficiently limit the overhead.
In this paper we present new optimization formulations for maximizing the network lifetime in wireless mesh networks performing data aggregation and dissemination for machine-to-machine communication in the Internet of Things. We focus on heterogeneous networks in which multiple applications co-exist and nodes may take on different roles for different applications. Moreover, we address network reconfiguration as a means to increase the network lifetime, in keeping with the current trend towards software defined networks and network function virtualization. To test our optimization formulations…
In wireless mesh networks such as WLAN (IEEE 802.11s) or WMAN (IEEE 802.11), each node should help to relay packets of neighboring nodes toward gateway using multi-hop routing mechanisms. Wireless mesh networks usually intensively deploy mesh nodes to deal with the problem of dead spot communication. However, the higher density of nodes deployed, the higher radio interference occurred. This causes significant degradation of system performance. In this paper, we first convert network problems into geometry problems in graph theory, and then solve the interference problem by geometric algorithms…
This paper discusses the design, implementation and field trials of WiMesh - a resilient Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) based disaster communication system purpose-built for underdeveloped and rural parts of the world. Mesh networking is a mature area, and the focus of this paper is not on proposing novel models, protocols or other mesh solutions. Instead, the paper focuses on the identification of important design considerations and justifications for several design trade offs in the context of mesh networking for disaster communication in developing countries with very limited resources. These …
ZigBee mesh network is very important research field in computer networks. However, the location of ZigBee coordinator plays a significant role in design and routing performance. In this paper, an extensive study on the factors that influence the performance of AODV routing protocol had been performed through the study of battery voltage decaying of nodes, neighboring tables, time delay and network topology structure. Simulation results reveal that the location of the coordinator within approximate equal distances to all nodes is more appropriate for lifelong batteries and AODV routing perform…
Wireless mesh networks appear as an appealing solution to reduce the digital divide between rural and urban regions. However the placement of router nodes is still a critical issue when planning this type of network, especially in rural regions where we usually observe low density and sparse population. In this paper, we firstly provide a network model tied to rural regions by considering the area to cover as decomposed into a set of elementary areas which can be required or optional in terms of coverage and where a node can be placed or not. Afterwards, we try to determine an optimal number a…
Recently multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks are considered a reliable and cost effective way for internet access in wide area. A major research challenge in this network is selecting least interference channel from available channel and then assigning it to radio efficiently. Many algorithms and methods have been developed for channel assignment to maximize network throughput using orthogonal channels. Recent research and testbed experiments proved that POC based channel assignment allows more flexibility in wireless spectrum sharing. In this paper, we represent the channel assig…
The objective of this systematic review is to assess the state of the art on routing protocols aimed at WMNs, when associated with mechanisms for financial incentives that aim to ensure the self-sustainability of the network, seeking to identify the improvements and associated risks as well as the efficiency of the mechanisms adopted within networks, thus ensuring increased reliability in the use of such protocols for routing encouraged WMNs.
Latency-minimization is recognized as one of the pillars of 5G network architecture design. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) appears a promising candidate technology for building an agile communication model that reduces latency through in-network caching. However, no proposal has developed so far latency-aware cache management mechanisms for ICN. In the paper, we investigate the role of latency awareness on data delivery performance in ICN and introduce LAC, a new simple, yet very effective, Latency-Aware Cache management policy. The designed mechanism leverages in a distributed fashion l…
Multi cast communication is a key technology for wireless mesh networks. Multicast provides efficient data distribution among a group of nodes, Generally sensor networks and MANETs uses multicast algorithms which are designed to be energy efficient and to achieve optimal route discovery among mobile nodes whereas wireless mesh networks needs to maximize throughput. Here we propose two multicast algorithms: The Level Channel Assignment (LCA) algorithm and the Multi-Channel Multicast (MCM) algorithm to improve the throughput for multichannel sand multi interface mesh networks. The algorithm buil…
Reducing CO2 emissions is an important global environmental issue. Over the recent years, wireless and mobile communications have increasingly become popular with consumers. An increasingly popular type of wireless access is the so-called Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) that provide wireless connectivity through much cheaper and more flexible backhaul infrastructure compared with wired solutions. Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an emerging new technology which is being adopted as the wireless internetworking solution for the near future. Due to increased energy consumption in the information and …
In this paper, we proposed a novel OTSS-assisted optical network architecture for smart-grid communication networks, which has unique requirements for low-latency connections. Illustrative results show that, OTSS can provide extremely better performance in latency and blocking probability than conventional flexi-grid optical networks.
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…
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…
Multi-beam antenna technologies have provided lots of promising solutions to many current challenges faced in wireless mesh networks. The antenna can establish several beamformings simultaneously and initiate concurrent transmissions or receptions using multiple beams, thereby increasing the overall throughput of the network transmission. Multi-beam antenna has the ability to increase the spatial reuse, extend the transmission range, improve the transmission reliability, as well as save the power consumption. Traditional Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for wireless network largely relied…
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 …
Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) deployments are poised to reduce the reliance on wired infrastructure especially with the advent of the multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) WMN architecture. But the benefits that MRMC WMNs offer viz., augmented network capacity, uninterrupted connectivity and reduced latency, are depreciated by the detrimental effect of prevalent interference. Interference mitigation is thus a prime objective in WMN deployments. It is often accomplished through prudent channel allocation (CA) schemes which minimize the adverse impact of interference and enhance the network performance…
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…
We present a novel dual-DBA allocation, with a fast P4-enabled scheduler to provide low latency upstream grant allocations. We show latency reduction of 37% and 43%, respectively, compared to standard and virtual PONs
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 this paper we demonstrate that the Canine Pose Estimation (CPE) system can provide a reliable estimate for some poses and when coupled with effective wireless transmission over a mesh network. Pose estimates are time sensitive, thus it is important that pose data arrives at its destination quickly. Propagation delay and packet delivery ratio measuring algorithms were developed and used to appraise Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) performance as a means of carriage for this time-critical data. The experiments were conducted in the rooms of a building where the radio characteristics closely resemb…
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…
The fifth generation (5G) wireless network technology is to be standardized by 2020, where main goals are to improve capacity, reliability, and energy efficiency, while reducing latency and massively increasing connection density. An integral part of 5G is the capability to transmit touch perception type real-time communication empowered by applicable robotics and haptics equipment at the network edge. In this regard, we need drastic changes in network architecture including core and radio access network (RAN) for achieving end-to-end latency on the order of 1 ms. In this paper, we present a d…
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been extensively studied for nearly two decades as one of the most promising candidates expected to power the high bandwidth, high coverage wireless networks of the future. However, consumer demand for such networks has only recently caught up, rendering efforts at optimizing WMNs to support high capacities and offer high QoS, while being secure and fault tolerant, more important than ever. To this end, a recent trend has been the application of Machine Learning (ML) to solve various design and management tasks related to WMNs. In this work, we discuss key ML…
We present a heuristic algorithm for a PON upstream scheduling hypervisor,supporting low latency services with strict service-level agreement. The algorithm achieves near-optimal performance while running in only 3.5 us, thus operating in real-time.
The relationship between topology and network throughput of arbitrarily-connected mesh networks is studied. Taking into account nonlinear channel properties, it is shown that throughput decreases logarithmically with physical network size with minor dependence on network ellipticity.
Wireless mesh networks have seen a real progress due of their implementation at a low cost. They present one of Next Generation Networks technologies and can serve as home, companies and universities networks. In this paper, we propose and discuss a new multi-objective model for nodes deployment optimization in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks. We exploit the trade-off between network cost and the overall network performance. This optimization problem is solved simultaneously by using a meta-heuristic method that returns a non-dominated set of near optimal solutions. A comparat…
UAVs are increasingly appearing in swarms or formations to leverage cooperative behavior, forming flying ad hoc networks. These UAV-enabled networks can meet several complex mission requirements and are seen as a potential enabler for many of the emerging use-cases in future communication networks. Such networks, however, are characterized by a highly dynamic and mobile environment with no guarantee of a central network infrastructure which can cause both connectivity and security issues. While wireless mesh networks are envisioned as a solution for such scenarios, these networks come with the…
We propose a process algebra for wireless mesh networks that combines novel treatments of local broadcast, conditional unicast and data structures. In this framework, we model the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol and (dis)prove crucial properties such as loop freedom and packet delivery.
We introduce a decentralized replication strategy for peer-to-peer file exchange based on exhaustive exploration of the neighborhood of any node in the network. The replication scheme lets the replicas evenly populate the network mesh, while regulating the total number of replicas at the same time. This is achieved by self adaptation to entering or leaving of nodes. Exhaustive exploration is achieved by a spiral walk algorithm that generates a number of messages linearly proportional to the number of visited nodes. It requires a dedicated topology (a triangular mesh on a closed surface). We in…
In this paper we apply the concept of overlay cognitive radio to the communication between nodes in a wireless mesh network. Based on the overlay cognitive radio model, it is possible to have two concurrent transmissions in a given interference region, where usually only one communication takes place at a given time. We analyze the cases of wireless mesh networks with regular and random topologies. Numerical results show that considerable network capacity gains can be achieved.
Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, while blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue or other forms of economic compensations from sharing of network traffic, content and services. Crowdsourcing network coverage, combined with crowdfunding costs, can create economically sustainable yet decentralized Internet access. This means every part…
