Die Besonderheit der drahtlosen Kommunikation gegenüber den drahtgebundenen Netzwerken liegt im drahtlosen Übertragungsmedium. Aufgrund der Broadcast-Eigenschaft des Übertragungsmediums werden Nachrichten potentiell von allen Netzwerkstationen empfangen, welche sich in der Übertragungsreichweite des Senders aufhalten. Als Konsequenz können bei einem unsynchronisierten Medienzugriff mehrere Nachrichten beim Empfänger kollidieren und nicht korrekt empfangen werden. Dieses Phänomen wird auch als Interferenz bezeichnet. Um solche Interferenzen zu vermeiden, wurden spezielle Protokolle für den Medienzugriff in drahtlosen Netzen entwickelt. Ein solcher Ansatz für drahtlose Maschennetze ist die verteilte Kanalzuweisung. Bei der verteilten Kanalzuweisung werden sich nicht-überlappende Kanäle im verfügbaren Frequenzspektrum für Übertragungen verwendet, die auf dem gleichen Kanal Interferenzen erzeugen würden. Dieser Ansatz ist möglich, da die verwendeten Funktechnologien, wie zum Beispiel IEEE 802.11 (WLAN), mehrere nicht-überlappende Kanäle bereitstellen. Aufgrund der großen Verbreitung von IEEE 802.11, ist eine hohe Dichte von privaten wie kommerziellen Netzen im urbanen Raum die Norm. Diese räumlich überlappenden Netze konkurrieren um den Medienzugriff. Daher ist es für die Leistung von Kanalzuweisungsalgorithmen von großer Bedeutung, die Aktivität der externen Netze mit einzubeziehen. Die Leistung der vorgelegten Arbeit umfasst das Design, die Implementierung und Validierung von Modellen und Algorithmen zur Reduzierung von Interferenzen in drahtlosen Maschennetzen. Die Arbeit beinhaltet die Entwicklung eines Messungs-basierten Interferenzmodells, mit dem Interferenzabhängigkeiten der Maschenrouter untereinander effizient bestimmt werden können. Weiterhin wurde ein Algorithmus für die verteilte Kanalzuweisung entwickelt, der die Aktivität von externen Netzen berücksichtigt. Die Gesamtlösung wurde in einem großen drahtlosen Maschennetz experimentell validiert. / Due to the broadcast nature of the shared medium, wireless transmissions are potentially received by all network stations in the communication range of the sender. With an unsynchronized medium access, multiple transmissions may be active at the same time and thus interfere with each other. In consequence, multiple transmissions may collide at the receiver side and cannot be properly decoded. For this reason, protocols have been developed on the MAC layer to synchronize the medium access and thus reduce interference effects. One of these approaches in wireless mesh networks is channel assignment. The idea of channel assignment is to minimize the network-wide interference by utilizing non-overlapping channels for otherwise interfering wireless transmissions. This is feasible, since wireless mesh routers are usually equipped with multiple radios and commonly used wireless network technologies, such as IEEE 802.11, provide multiple non-overlapping channels. Since IEEE 802.11 operates in the unlicensed frequency spectrum, the dense distribution of private and commercial network deployments of WLANs in urban areas poses a new challenge. Co-located networks compete for the wireless medium, thus decreasing the achievable network performance in terms of throughput and latency. Therefore, an important issue for efficient channel assignment is to also address external interference The contributions of this dissertation comprise the design, implementation, and validation of models and algorithms to enable wireless multi-hop networks to become interference-aware. This includes a measurement-based interference model suitable for large-scale network deployments. A distributed channel assignment algorithm has been developed that considers external sources of interference. The overall solution has been experimentally validated in a large-scale wireless multi-hop multi-radio testbed and has significantly increased the network performance with regard to the network capacity.

A significant number of protocols and capabilities have been proposed in recent years in response to the demand for reducing the amount of energy consumed by the network infrastructure. Besides rising economic issues, there is a widespread sensitivity to ecological impacts since both energy costs and electrical demands are in a upward trend. In this scenario, the development and validation of energy saving strategies are a key point of making networks more efficient. However, there is a lack of experimental environments designed specifically to emulate and to validate such energy efficiency solutions. This work proposes an environment not only supporting the development and discussion of energy-saving solutions but also management applications considering energy-saving primitives. For this purpose, the environment is built considering the implementation of energy efficiency capabilities that are representative of each network scope (interface, device, and network) in the Mininet environment taking as a basis the Software-defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. The environment proposed was evaluated with different experiments by comparing the energy savings obtained by activating these energy-efficiency capabilities. / Um significativo número de protocolos e funcionalidades foram propostos em resposta à crescente demanda de energia por infraestruturas de rede. Além de gerar problemas econômicos, existe uma preocupação quanto aos impactos ambientais uma vez que maior a demanda por eletricidade, maior o impacto ambiental para suprir esta demanda. Neste cenário, o desenvolvimento e validação de estratégias para economizar energia são um ponto chave para tornar infraestruturas de rede mais eficiente. No entanto, há uma falta de ambientes desenvolvidos especificamente para emular e validar soluções para eficiência energética. Com este propósito este trabalho propõe um ambiente capaz de suportar não apenas o desenvolvimento de soluções para tornar redes mais eficientes energeticamente, como também o desenvolvimento de aplicações de gerenciamento que baseiam-se em primitivas de economia de energia. Para este propósito, o ambiente é construído considerando a implementação de funcionalidades orientadas à eficiência energética que são representativas para cada escopo de rede (interface, dispositivo e rede) no ambiente de emulação Mininet tomando como base o paradigma de redes definidas por software. O ambiente proposto foi validade por meio de diferentes experimentos comparando a economia de energia obtida pela ativação destas funcionalidades.

A significant number of protocols and capabilities have been proposed in recent years in response to the demand for reducing the amount of energy consumed by the network infrastructure. Besides rising economic issues, there is a widespread sensitivity to ecological impacts since both energy costs and electrical demands are in a upward trend. In this scenario, the development and validation of energy saving strategies are a key point of making networks more efficient. However, there is a lack of experimental environments designed specifically to emulate and to validate such energy efficiency solutions. This work proposes an environment not only supporting the development and discussion of energy-saving solutions but also management applications considering energy-saving primitives. For this purpose, the environment is built considering the implementation of energy efficiency capabilities that are representative of each network scope (interface, device, and network) in the Mininet environment taking as a basis the Software-defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. The environment proposed was evaluated with different experiments by comparing the energy savings obtained by activating these energy-efficiency capabilities. / Um significativo número de protocolos e funcionalidades foram propostos em resposta à crescente demanda de energia por infraestruturas de rede. Além de gerar problemas econômicos, existe uma preocupação quanto aos impactos ambientais uma vez que maior a demanda por eletricidade, maior o impacto ambiental para suprir esta demanda. Neste cenário, o desenvolvimento e validação de estratégias para economizar energia são um ponto chave para tornar infraestruturas de rede mais eficiente. No entanto, há uma falta de ambientes desenvolvidos especificamente para emular e validar soluções para eficiência energética. Com este propósito este trabalho propõe um ambiente capaz de suportar não apenas o desenvolvimento de soluções para tornar redes mais eficientes energeticamente, como também o desenvolvimento de aplicações de gerenciamento que baseiam-se em primitivas de economia de energia. Para este propósito, o ambiente é construído considerando a implementação de funcionalidades orientadas à eficiência energética que são representativas para cada escopo de rede (interface, dispositivo e rede) no ambiente de emulação Mininet tomando como base o paradigma de redes definidas por software. O ambiente proposto foi validade por meio de diferentes experimentos comparando a economia de energia obtida pela ativação destas funcionalidades.

In the early stages of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), low data rate traffic patterns are assumed as applications have a single purpose with simple sensing task and data packets are generated at a rate of minutes or hours. As such, most of the proposed communication protocols focus on energy efficiency rather than high throughput. Emerging high data rate applications motivate bulk data transfer protocols to achieve high throughput. The basic idea is to enable nodes to transmit a sequence of packets in burst once they obtain a medium. However, due to the low-power, low-cost nature, the transceiver used in wireless sensor networks is prone to packet loss. Especially when the transmitters are mobile, packet loss becomes worse. To reduce the energy expenditure caused by packet loss and retransmission, a burst transmission scheme is required that can adapt to the link dynamics and estimate the number of packets to transmit in burst. As the mobile node is moving within the network, it cannot always maintain a stable link with one specific stationary node. When link deterioration is constantly detected, the mobile node has to initiate a handover process to seamlessly transfer the communication to a new relay node before the current link breaks. For this reason, it is vital for a mobile node to (1) determine whether a fluctuation in link quality eventually results in a disconnection, (2) foresee potential disconnection well ahead of time and establish an alternative link before the disconnection occurs, and (3) seamlessly transfer communication to the new link. In this dissertation, we focus on dealing with burst transmission and handover issues in low power mobile wireless sensor networks. To this end, we begin with designing a novel mobility enabled testing framework as the evaluation testbed for all our remaining studies. We then perform an empirical study to investigate the link characteristics in mobile environments. Using these observations as guidelines, we propose three algorithms related to mobility that will improve network performance in terms of latency and throughput: i) Mobility Enabled Testing Framework (MobiLab). Considering the high fluctuation of link quality during mobility, protocols supporting mobile wireless sensor nodes should be rigorously tested to ensure that they produce predictable outcomes before actual deployment. Furthermore, considering the typical size of wireless sensor networks and the number of parameters that can be configured or tuned, conducting repeated and reproducible experiments can be both time consuming and costly. The conventional method for evaluating the performance of different protocols and algorithms under different network configurations is to change the source code and reprogram the testbed, which requires considerable effort. To this end, we present a mobility enabled testbed for carrying out repeated and reproducible experiments, independent of the application or protocol types which should be tested. The testbed consists of, among others, a server side control station and a client side traffic ow controller which coordinates inter- and intra-experiment activities. ii) Adaptive Burst Transmission Scheme for Dynamic Environment. Emerging high data rate applications motivate bulk data transfer protocol to achieve high throughput. The basic idea is to enable nodes to transmit a sequence of packets in burst once they obtain a medium. Due to the low-power and low-cost nature, the transceiver used in wireless sensor networks is prone to packet loss. When the transmitter is mobile, packet loss becomes even worse. The existing bulk data transfer protocols are not energy efficient since they keep their radios on even while a large number of consecutive packet losses occur. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive burst transmission scheme (ABTS). In the design of the ABTS, we estimate the expected duration in which the quality of a specific link remains stable using the conditional distribution function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of received acknowledgment packets. We exploit the expected duration to determine the number of packets to transmit in burst and the duration of the sleeping period. iii) Kalman Filter Based Handover Triggering Algorithm (KMF). Maintaining a stable link in mobile wireless sensor network is challenging. In the design of the KMF, we utilized combined link quality metrics in physical and link layers, such as Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and packet success rate (PSR), to estimate link quality fluctuation online. Then Kalman filter is adopted to predict link dynamics ahead of time. If a predicted link quality fulfills handover trigger criterion, a handover process will be initiated to discover alternative relay nodes and establish a new link before the disconnection occurs. iv) Mobile Sender Initiated MAC Protocol (MSI-MAC). In cellular networks, mobile stations are always associated with the nearest base station through intra- and inter-cellular handover. The underlying process is that the quality of an established link is continually evaluated and handover decisions are made by resource rich base stations. In wireless sensor networks, should a seamless handover be carried out, the task has to be accomplished by energy-constraint, resource-limited, and low-power wireless sensor nodes in a distributed manner. To this end, we present MSI-MAC, a mobile sender initiated MAC protocol to enable seamless handover.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of Sensor Nodes (SNs) spatially removed from one another, that can monitor a variety of environmental conditions. SNs then collaboratively communicate the collected information to a central location, by passing along the data in a multi-hop fashion. SN energy resources are limited and energy monitoring and preservation in WSNs are therefore very important. Since multi-hop communication takes place, the routing protocol used may have a significant effect on the balanced use and preservation of energy in the WSN. A significant amount of research has been performed on energy efficient routing in WSNs, but the majority of these studies were only implemented in simulation. The simulation engines used to perform these studies do not take into account all of the relevant environmental factors affecting energy efficiency. In order to comment on the feasibility of a routing protocol meant to improve the energy efficiency of a WSN, it is important to test the routing scheme in a realistic environment. In this study, a SN specifically designed to be used in an energy consumption ascertaining WSN testbed was developed. This SN has a unique set of features which makes it ideal for this application. Each SN is capable of recording its own power consumption. The design also features a lithium battery charging circuit which improves the reusability of the SN. Each node has a detachable sensor module and transceiver module which enables the researcher to conduct experiments using various transceivers and sensors. Twenty of these SNs were then used to form an energy consumption ascertaining WSN testbed. This testbed was used to compare the energy consumption of a Minimum Total Transmission Power Routing (MTTPR) scheme to a shortest hop path routing scheme. The results show that each SN’s transmission power setting dependant efficiency has a significant effect on the overall performance of the MTTPR scheme. The MTTPR scheme might in some cases use more energy than a shortest hop path routing scheme because the transmission power setting dependant efficiency of the transceiver is not taken into account. The MTTPR scheme as well as other similar routing schemes can be improved by taking the transceiver efficiency at different transmission power settings into account. Simulation environments used to evaluate these routing schemes can also be improved by considering the transceiver efficiency at different transmission power settings. / MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of Sensor Nodes (SNs) spatially removed from one another, that can monitor a variety of environmental conditions. SNs then collaboratively communicate the collected information to a central location, by passing along the data in a multi-hop fashion. SN energy resources are limited and energy monitoring and preservation in WSNs are therefore very important. Since multi-hop communication takes place, the routing protocol used may have a significant effect on the balanced use and preservation of energy in the WSN. A significant amount of research has been performed on energy efficient routing in WSNs, but the majority of these studies were only implemented in simulation. The simulation engines used to perform these studies do not take into account all of the relevant environmental factors affecting energy efficiency. In order to comment on the feasibility of a routing protocol meant to improve the energy efficiency of a WSN, it is important to test the routing scheme in a realistic environment. In this study, a SN specifically designed to be used in an energy consumption ascertaining WSN testbed was developed. This SN has a unique set of features which makes it ideal for this application. Each SN is capable of recording its own power consumption. The design also features a lithium battery charging circuit which improves the reusability of the SN. Each node has a detachable sensor module and transceiver module which enables the researcher to conduct experiments using various transceivers and sensors. Twenty of these SNs were then used to form an energy consumption ascertaining WSN testbed. This testbed was used to compare the energy consumption of a Minimum Total Transmission Power Routing (MTTPR) scheme to a shortest hop path routing scheme. The results show that each SN’s transmission power setting dependant efficiency has a significant effect on the overall performance of the MTTPR scheme. The MTTPR scheme might in some cases use more energy than a shortest hop path routing scheme because the transmission power setting dependant efficiency of the transceiver is not taken into account. The MTTPR scheme as well as other similar routing schemes can be improved by taking the transceiver efficiency at different transmission power settings into account. Simulation environments used to evaluate these routing schemes can also be improved by considering the transceiver efficiency at different transmission power settings. / MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Wireless video capsule endoscopy (VCE) plays an increasingly important role in assisting clinical diagnoses of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. It provides a non-invasive way to examine the entire small intestine, where other conventional endoscopic instruments can barely reach. Existing examination systems for the VCE cannot track the location of a endoscopic capsule, which prevents the physician from identifying the exact location of the diseases. During the eight hour examination time, the video capsule continuously keeps taking images at a frame rate up to six frame per sec, so it is possible to extract the motion information from the content of the image sequence. Many attempts have been made to develop computer vision algorithms to detect the motion of the capsule based on the small changes in the consecutive video frames and then trace the location of the capsule. However, validation of those algorithms has become a challenging topic because conducting experiments on the human body is extremely difficult due to individual differences and legal issues. In this thesis, two validation approaches for motion tracking of the VCE are presented in detail respectively. One approach is to build a physical testbed with a plastic pipe and an endoscopy camera; the other is to build a virtual testbed by creating a three-dimensional virtual small intestine model and simulating the motion of the capsule. Based on the virtual testbed, a physiological factor, intestinal contraction, has been studied in terms of its influence on visual based localization algorithm and a geometric model for measuring the amount of contraction is proposed and validated via the virtual testbed. Empirical results have made contributions in support of the performance evaluation of other research on the visual based localization algorithm of VCE.

A realistic comparative performance evaluation of indoor Geolocation systems is a complex and challenging problem facing the research community. This is due to the fact that performance of these systems depends on the statistical variations of the fading multipath characteristics of the wireless channel, the density and distribution of the access points in the area, and the number of the training points used by the positioning algorithm. This problem, in particular, becomes more challenging when we address RFID devices, because the RFID tags and the positioning algorithm are implemented in two separate devices. In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a testbed for comparative performance evaluation of RFID localization systems in a controlled and repeatable laboratory environment. The testbed consists of a real-time RF channel simulator, several WiFi 802.11 access points, commercial RFID tags, and a laptop loaded with the positioning algorithm and its associated user interface. In the real-time channel simulator the fading multipath characteristics of the wireless channel between the access points and the RFID tags is modeled by a modified site-specific IEEE 802.11 channel model which combines this model with the correlation model of shadow fading existing in the literature. The testbed is first used to compare the performance of the modified IEEE 802.11 channel model and the Ray Tracing channel model previously reported in the literature. Then, the testbed with the new channel model is used for comparative performance evaluation of two different WiFi RFID devices.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) built with commodity 802.11 radios are a cost-effective means of providing last mile broadband Internet access. Their multihop architecture allows for rapid deployment and organic growth of these networks. 802.11 radios are an important building block in WMNs. These low cost radios are readily available, and can be used globally in license-exempt frequency bands. However, the 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) medium access mechanism does not scale well in large multihop networks. This produces suboptimal behavior in many transport protocols, including TCP, the dominant transport protocol in the Internet. In particular, cross-layer interaction between DCF and TCP results in flow level unfairness, including starvation, with backlogged traffic sources. Solutions found in the literature propose distributed source rate control algorithms to alleviate this problem. However, this requires MAC-layer or transport-layer changes on all mesh routers. This is often infeasible in practical deployments. In wireline networks, router-assisted rate control techniques have been proposed for use alongside end-to-end mechanisms. We evaluate the feasibility of establishing similar centralized control via gateway mesh routers in WMNs. We find that commonly used router-assisted flow control schemes designed for wired networks fail in WMNs. This is because they assume that: (1) links can be scheduled independently, and (2) router queue buildups are sufficient for detecting congestion. These abstractions do not hold in a wireless network, rendering wired scheduling algorithms such as Fair Queueing (and its variants) and Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques ineffective as a gateway-enforceable solution in a WMN. We show that only non-work-conserving rate-based scheduling can effectively enforce rate allocation via a single centralized traffic-aggregation point. In this context we propose, design, and evaluate a framework of centralized, measurement-based, feedback-driven mechanisms that can enforce a rate allocation policy objective for adaptive traffic streams in a WMN. In this dissertation we focus on fair rate allocation requirements. Our approach does not require any changes to individual mesh routers. Further, it uses existing data traffic as capacity probes, thus incurring a zero control traffic overhead. We propose two mechanisms based on this approach: aggregate rate control (ARC) and per-flow rate control (PFRC). ARC limits the aggregate capacity of a network to the sum of fair rates for a given set of flows. We show that the resulting rate allocation achieved by DCF is approximately max-min fair. PFRC allows us to exercise finer-grained control over the rate allocation process. We show how it can be used to achieve weighted flow rate fairness. We evaluate the performance of these mechanisms using simulations as well as implementation on a multihop wireless testbed. Our comparative analysis show that our mechanisms improve fairness indices by a factor of 2 to 3 when compared with networks without any rate limiting, and are approximately equivalent to results achieved with distributed source rate limiting mechanisms that require software modifications on all mesh routers.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) built with commodity 802.11 radios are a cost-effective means of providing last mile broadband Internet access. Their multihop architecture allows for rapid deployment and organic growth of these networks. 802.11 radios are an important building block in WMNs. These low cost radios are readily available, and can be used globally in license-exempt frequency bands. However, the 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) medium access mechanism does not scale well in large multihop networks. This produces suboptimal behavior in many transport protocols, including TCP, the dominant transport protocol in the Internet. In particular, cross-layer interaction between DCF and TCP results in flow level unfairness, including starvation, with backlogged traffic sources. Solutions found in the literature propose distributed source rate control algorithms to alleviate this problem. However, this requires MAC-layer or transport-layer changes on all mesh routers. This is often infeasible in practical deployments. In wireline networks, router-assisted rate control techniques have been proposed for use alongside end-to-end mechanisms. We evaluate the feasibility of establishing similar centralized control via gateway mesh routers in WMNs. We find that commonly used router-assisted flow control schemes designed for wired networks fail in WMNs. This is because they assume that: (1) links can be scheduled independently, and (2) router queue buildups are sufficient for detecting congestion. These abstractions do not hold in a wireless network, rendering wired scheduling algorithms such as Fair Queueing (and its variants) and Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques ineffective as a gateway-enforceable solution in a WMN. We show that only non-work-conserving rate-based scheduling can effectively enforce rate allocation via a single centralized traffic-aggregation point. In this context we propose, design, and evaluate a framework of centralized, measurement-based, feedback-driven mechanisms that can enforce a rate allocation policy objective for adaptive traffic streams in a WMN. In this dissertation we focus on fair rate allocation requirements. Our approach does not require any changes to individual mesh routers. Further, it uses existing data traffic as capacity probes, thus incurring a zero control traffic overhead. We propose two mechanisms based on this approach: aggregate rate control (ARC) and per-flow rate control (PFRC). ARC limits the aggregate capacity of a network to the sum of fair rates for a given set of flows. We show that the resulting rate allocation achieved by DCF is approximately max-min fair. PFRC allows us to exercise finer-grained control over the rate allocation process. We show how it can be used to achieve weighted flow rate fairness. We evaluate the performance of these mechanisms using simulations as well as implementation on a multihop wireless testbed. Our comparative analysis show that our mechanisms improve fairness indices by a factor of 2 to 3 when compared with networks without any rate limiting, and are approximately equivalent to results achieved with distributed source rate limiting mechanisms that require software modifications on all mesh routers.