In recent years, routing research concerning wired networks has focused on minimizing the maximum utilization of the links which is equivalent to reducing the number of bottlenecks while supporting the same traffic demands. This can be achieved using multipath routing with load balancing instead of single path routing using of routing optimizers. However, in the domain of ad hoc networks multipath routing has not been investigated in depth. We would like to develop an analogy between wired and wireless networks, but before that we need to identify the major differences between these two in the case of multipath routing. First, in order to increase the network throughput, the multiple paths have to be independent so they don't share the same bottlenecks. Then, due to radio propagation properties the link capacity is not constant. So using the maximum utilization metric for wireless networks is not suitable. Based on the research done in wired networks, which has shown that using multiple paths with load balancing policies between sourcedestination pairs can minimize the maximum utilization of the links, we investigate if this is applicable to ad hoc networks. This paper proposes a multipath routing algorithm with a load balancing policy. The results obtained from an indoor 802.11g network highlight two major points. The maximum throughput is not achieved with multipath routing, but with single path routing. However, the results on the delivery ratio are encouraging, indeed we observe a real improvement thanks to our multipath routing algorithm. / På senare år har routning forskningen angående trådnätverken focusen på att minska den maximala användingen av länkar vilket motsvarar än reducering av flaskhalsar medan man stöder samma trafikkrav. Det här kan åstadkommas genom att av multiväg routning med lasta balansering I stället för använder enkelvägrouting med routing optimizers. Emellertid har inom ad hoc nätverken multiväg routning har inte blivit undersökts på djupet. Vi skulle vilja utveckla en analogy emellan trådnätverk och trådlösnätverken.men främföre det behöver identifiera de store differenserna mellan dessa två vid multiväg routning. För det första måste de flerfaldiga vägarna vara oberoende för att öka nätverkens throughput så de inte delar samma flaskhalsar. Sedan är länkkapaciteten inte constant på grund av radiospridningsegenskaperna. Så den maximal användningsmetric för trådlös nätverken passar inte. Den här arbetetet föreslår en multiväg routning algoritm med lasta balanseringen. Resultaten få från en indoor 802.11g nätverk framhåller ger två store meningen. Den maximala throughput är inte åstadkoms med multiväg routing, men med enkelväg routning. Emellertid är resultaten på den leveransförhållande uppmuntrande; vi observera en verklig förbättring tack vare vår multiväg routning algoritmen.

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Traffic polarization in networks refers to the phenomenon where traffic tends to concentrate along specific routes or edges when doing multipath routing, leading to imbalanced flow patterns. This spatial distribution of traffic can result in congested and overburdened links, while other routes remain underutilized. Such imbalanced traffic distribution can lead to network bottlenecks, reduced throughput, and compromised Quality of Service for critical applications. These issues emphasize the urgent necessity to address traffic polarization and its detrimental impact on network efficiency and resilience. In this master thesis, we introduce a novel approach to tackle the problem of hash polarization and evaluate the performance of our implementation. Perhaps influenced by the RFC 2992 document, previous works always use the whole value of the hash result to do the multipath routing decisions, and therefore try to mitigate the polarization problem by developing more functions or reusing them. However, we investigate if the polarizion issue can be solved by utilizing different parts of the hash result. In this case, the most critical problem would be how to choose the bits of the hash result for the multipath routing decisions. Unfortunately, during the experiment, we discovered that the optimal performance design is influenced by many factors in the network topology and traffic demand pattern, making it difficult to summarize a universal law. Nevertheless, our research has proposed a mechanism called “bit-awareness”, which can significantly alleviate the problem of selecting overlapping bits, and hence addresses the polarization issue. / Trafikpolarisering i nätverk hänvisar till fenomenet där trafik tenderar att koncentreras längs specifika rutter eller kanter när man gör flervägsdirigering, vilket leder till obalanserade flödesmönster. Denna rumsliga fördelning av trafik kan resultera i överbelastade och överbelastade länkar, medan andra vägar förblir underutnyttjade. Sådan obalanserad trafikdistribution kan leda till nätverksflaskhalsar, minskad genomströmning och försämrad tjänstekvalitet för kritiska applikationer. Dessa frågor betonar det akuta behovet av att ta itu med trafikpolarisering och dess skadliga inverkan på nätverkseffektivitet och motståndskraft. I denna masteruppsats introducerar vi ett nytt tillvägagångssätt för att tackla problemet med hashpolarisering och utvärdera prestandan för vår implementering. Kanske påverkat av RFC 2992-dokumentet, skulle tidigare arbeten använda hela värdet av hashresultatet för att fatta beslut om flervägsdirigering och därför försöka mildra polariseringsproblemet genom att utveckla fler funktioner eller återanvända dem. Vi undrar dock om problemet kan lösas genom att använda olika delar av hashresultatet. I det här fallet skulle det mest avgörande problemet vara hur man väljer bitarna i hashresultatet för besluten om flervägsdirigering. Tyvärr upptäckte vi under experimentet att den optimala prestandadesignen påverkas av många faktorer i nätverkstopologin och trafikefterfrågan, vilket gör det svårt att sammanfatta en universell lag. Ändå har vår forskning föreslagit en mekanism som kallas ”bit-medvetenhet”, som avsevärt kan lindra problemet med att välja överlappande bitar, och därmed adresserar polariseringsfrågan.

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Video communications play a vital role in present and future wireless ad hoc networks. One of the key requirements for a successful deployment of multimedia applications in multihop wireless networks is the ability to provide an acceptable video quality, even under a highly dynamic and perhaps unfriendly (or hostile) environment (e.g., in the presence of frequent node/link failure, interference, shadowing, fading, and so forth). Existing ad hoc routing protocols work well for data communications, but are not optimized for video, which is sensitive to latency and packet loss. Moreover, traditional end system based error control mechanisms alone cannot guarantee a sustainable video quality. Conventional QoS approaches typically optimize one or more network layer metrics, but they are usually agnostic to any kind of application layer performance. Consequently, new methodologies must be explored to improve the performance of video applications in multihop wireless networks. This dissertation directly addresses this important problem area by leveraging recent advances in video coding techniques along with novel cross-layer formulations and powerful optimization techniques. We follow an application centric cross-layer approach to address multimedia service provisioning over ad hoc networks. Our research efforts show that video communications over multihop wireless networks can substantially benefit from a cross-layer design principle by factoring in application layer video quality into routing algorithmic designs at the network layer. There are three components in this investigation, namely, (1) concurrent routing, (2) path selection and rate allocation, and (3) multipath routing for multiple description video. Each component addresses one or more unique challenges that hinder video communications in multihop wireless networks. Although we expect that a cross-layer approach will be more effective than a network centric (single-layer) approach in addressing application performance, it also brings in complex problems that cannot be effectively solved using traditional methods, and thus, calls for the design of customized algorithms. In concurrent routing, we focus on issues that arise while supporting multiple concurrent video communication sessions in an ad hoc network. These sessions compete for limited network resources (such as bandwidth) while interacting with each other. Such inter-session interactions couple the performance of an individual flow with that of other flows. Applying a video centric cross-layer design principle, we model the end-to-end video distortion as a function of network layer behavior, and formulate a network-wide optimal routing problem that minimizes the total video distortion. Results based on computational experiments performed using randomly generated network topologies establish the relative efficacy and robustness of the proposed genetic algorithm based solution approach. Specifically, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms other trajectory based metaheuristic approaches as well as with conventional network centric routing algorithms such as shortest path and disjoint shortest path routing. The joint path selection and rate allocation problem considers not only selecting the best set of paths for video communication, but also, computing the optimal video encoding rate and partitioning it among the chosen set of paths. The end-to-end video distortion is modeled as a function of network layer resources by capturing the tight coupling that exists between the optimal encoding rate for each video session, the selection of paths for video transmission, and the allocation of traffic among these selected paths. This problem is formulated as a nonlinear nonconvex programming problem, for which a tight linear programming relaxation is constructed via the Reformulation-Linearization Technique (RLT). This construct is embedded within a specialized branch-and-bound algorithm to achieve global optimality. Computational experience is reported for various problem instances, and the results validate the robustness of the proposed algorithmic procedure. The results exhibit the advantage of the solution approach over the popularly used max-min rate allocation scheme. The emergence of Multiple Description (MD) coding technique offers great potential for multipath routing of video in multihop wireless networks. In studying multipath routing for MD coding, we show that MD coded video, when used in combination with multipath routing in wireless networks, has tremendous advantages over traditional layered video coding techniques. We discuss how to implement an MD video codec and formulate a cross-layer optimization problem that can find a set of optimal paths, (one for each description) such that the overall video quality at the receiver is maximized. We further devise a specialized RLT-based branch-and-bound solution procedure for the ensuing 0-1 mixed integer nonconvex optimization problem. Convergence behavior of the proposed solution procedure is observed for various network topologies and the results further demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed cross-layer approach over non-cross-layer approaches. The scope of this research is highly interdisciplinary. It intersects video communication, networking, optimization, and algorithm design. We expect that the theoretical and algorithmic results of this investigation will serve as important building blocks in developing a comprehensive methodology for addressing complex cross-layer problems in the area of wireless ad hoc networks. / Ph. D.

Video communication is an important application in wireless ad hoc network environment. Although current off-the-shelf video communication software would work for ad hoc network operating under stable conditions (e.g., extremely low link and node failures), video communications for ad hoc network operating under extreme conditions remain a challenging problem. This is because traditional video codec, either single steam or layered video, requires at least one relatively stable path between source and destination nodes. Recent advances in multiple description (MD) video coding have opened up new possibilities to offer video communications over ad hoc networks. In this thesis, we perform a systematic study on MD video for ad hoc networks. The theoretical foundation of this research is based on an application-centric approach to formulate a cross-layer multipath routing problem that minimizes the application layer video distortion. The solution procedure to this complex optimization problem is based on the so-called Genetic Algorithm (GA). The theoretical results have been documented in [7] and will be reviewed in Chapter 2. Although the theoretical foundation for MD video over dynamic ad hoc networks has been laid, there remains a lot of skepticisms in the research community on whether such cross-layer optimal routing can be implemented in practice. To fill this gap, this thesis is devoted to the experimental research (or proof-of-concept) for the work in [7]. Our approach is to design and implement an emulation testbed where we can actually implement the ideas and algorithms proposed in [7] in a controlled laboratory setting. The highlights of our experimental research include: 1. A testbed that emulates three properties of a wireless ad hoc network: topology, link success probability, and link bandwidth; 2. A source routing implementation that can easily support comparative study between the proposed GA-based routing with other routing schemes under different network conditions; 3. A modified H.263+ video codec that employs Unequal Error Protection (UEP) approach to generate MD video; 4. Implementation of three experiments that • compared the GA-based routing with existing technologies (NetMeeting video conferencing plus AODV routing); • compared our GA-based routing with network-centric routing schemes (two-disjoint paths routing); • proved that our approach has great potential in supporting video communications in wireless ad hoc networks. 5. Experimental results that show the proposed cross-layer optimization significantly outperforms the current off-the-shelf technologies, and that the proposed cross-layer optimization provides much better performance than network-centric routing schemes in supporting routing of MD video. In summary, the experimental research in this thesis has demonstrated that a cross-layer multipath routing algorithm can be practically implemented in a dynamic ad hoc network to support video communications. / Master of Science

In the first part of the thesis, we address the optimization of multimedia applications such as videoconferences or multi-player games in which user-dependent information has to be sent from the users to a core node to be chosen, and then global information has to be multicast back from the core node to all users. For a given communication network, this optimization seeks a core node under two potentially competing criteria, one being the sum of the distances to a set of user terminals, the other being the cost of connecting this core node and the terminals with a multicast (or Steiner) tree. We first consider the problem of minimizing a weighted sum of the two criteria and propose a heuristic which rapidly computes a solution guaranteed to be within a few percent of the optimum. Then we characterize the worst-case trade-offs between approximation ratios for the two criteria. To state our result informally, we show that there always exists a core location for which each criterion is close to its minimum value (if we were to disregard the other criterion). In the second part, we focus on the protection of multimedia streaming applications against packet losses. Because of real-time constraints, error recovery is often achieved by Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques which consist of partitioning the packet stream into blocks of consecutive packets and adding redundant data packets to each block. If the number of packets lost within a block is at most the number of redundant packets added, the receiver is able to recover the original data packets. Otherwise some data is irrecoverably lost. In communication networks, FEC techniques are typically impaired by the fact that packet losses are not evenly distributed among blocks but rather occur in long bursts of consecutive losses. However it has been observed that splitting the transmission of a FEC block onto several paths typically decreases the probability of an irrecoverable loss. Whereas current approaches rely on an exact computation of the probability and are consequently restricted to very small network instances, we propose to approximate this probability by measuring the impact of the chosen routing on the peakedness of the received packet stream. The peakedness of a stream may be seen as a measure of how packets are spread over time within the stream. Numerical experiments are presented and show that our method yields good approximations of the probability of irrecoverable loss./La première partie de cette thèse concerne l'optimisation d'applications multimédias, telles que des vidéoconférences ou des jeux en groupes, pour lesquels l'information propre à chaque utilisateur doit être envoyée vers un noeud central à sélectionner. L'information globale est ensuite diffusée en retour de ce noeud central vers chacun des utilisateurs. Pour un réseau de communication donné, cette optimisation consiste à choisir le noeud central selon deux critères potentiellement concurrents, le premier étant la somme des distances vers les utilisateurs, le second étant le coût de connecter ce noeud central et les utilisateurs avec un arbre multicast (ou arbre de Steiner). Nous considérons tout d'abord le problème de la minimisation d'une somme pondérée des deux critères et proposons une heuristique qui calcule rapidement une solution garantie d'être éloignée de l'optimum d'au plus quelques pour cent. Ensuite nous caractérisons les pires cas du compromis existant entre les rapports d'approximation pour les deux critères. De façon informelle, notre résultat peut se formuler comme suit : nous montrons qu'il est toujours possible de sélectionner le noeud central de telle sorte que chaque critère soit proche de sa valeur minimum (obtenue sans considérer l'autre critère). Dans la seconde partie, nous nous concentrons sur la protection des applications de diffusion multimédia (streaming) contre les pertes de paquets. A cause de contraintes temps réel, la récupération des erreurs pour ces applications est typiquement réalisée par des techniques de corrections d'erreurs dites "en avant" (Forward Error Correction ou FEC) qui consistent à partitionner le flux de paquets en blocs de paquets consécutifs et à ajouter des paquets de données redondantes à chacun de ces blocs. Si le nombre de paquets perdus au sein d'un bloc est inférieur ou égal au nombre de paquets ajoutés, le récepteur est capable de récupérer les paquets de données originaux. Dans le cas contraire, des données sont perdues de façon irrécupérable. Dans les réseaux de communication, l'efficacité des techniques FEC est typiquement dégradée par le fait que les pertes de paquets ne sont pas distribuées uniformément parmi les blocs de paquets mais apparaissent plutôt groupées par en rafales de pertes consécutives. Cependant il a été récemment observé que répartir la transmission d'un bloc FEC sur plusieurs chemins permet généralement de diminuer la probabilité de perte irrécupérable. Alors que les approches existantes se basent sur un calcul exact de cette probabilité et se limitent donc à des réseaux de très petite taille, nous proposons d'en calculer une approximation en mesurant l'impact du routage choisi sur la "peakedness" du flux de paquets. La peakedness d'un flux peut être vue comme un mesure de la répartition temporelle des paquets au sein de ce flux. Des résultats numériques sont présentés et montrent que notre méthode permet de calculer une bonne approximation de la probabilité de perte irrécupérable..

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without the support of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. There are many potential applications based the techniques of MANETs, such as disaster rescue, personal area networking, wireless conference, military applications, etc. MANETs face a number of challenges for designing a scalable routing protocol due to their natural characteristics. Guaranteeing delivery and the capability to handle dynamic connectivity are the most important issues for routing protocols in MANETs. In this dissertation, we will propose four algorithms that address different aspects of routing problems in MANETs. Firstly, in position based routing protocols to design a scalable location management scheme is inherently difficult. Enhanced Scalable Location management Service (EnSLS) is proposed to improve the scalability of existing location management services, and a mathematical model is proposed to compare the performance of the classical location service, GLS, and our protocol, EnSLS. The analytical model shows that EnSLS has better scalability compared with that of GLS. Secondly, virtual backbone routing can reduce communication overhead and speedup the routing process compared with many existing on-demand routing protocols for routing detection. In many studies, Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) is used to approximate virtual backbones in a unit-disk graph. However finding a MCDS is an NP-hard problem. In the dissertation, we develop two new pure localized protocols for calculating the CDS. One emphasizes forming a small size initial near-optimal CDS via marking process, and the other uses an iterative synchronized method to avoid illegal simultaneously removal of dominating nodes. Our new protocols largely reduce the number of nodes in CDS compared with existing methods. We show the efficiency of our approach through both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments. Finally, using multiple redundant paths for routing is a promising solution. However, selecting an optimal path set is an NP hard problem. We propose the Genetic Fuzzy Multi-path Routing Protocol (GFMRP), which is a multi-path routing protocol based on fuzzy set theory and evolutionary computing.

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