Due to its ability to deliver scalable and fault-tolerant solutions, applications based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm are used by millions of users on the internet. Recently, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted a lot of interest from both academia and industry, because of their potential to provide flexible and alternative broadband wireless internet connectivity. However, due to various reasons such as unstable wireless link characteristics and multi-hop forwarding operation, the performance of current P2P systems is rather low in WMNs. This dissertation studies the technological challenges involved while deploying P2P systems over WMNs. We study the benefits of location-awareness and resource replication to the P2P overlay while targeting efficient resource lookup in WMNs. We further propose a cross-layer information exchange between the P2P overlay and the WMN in order to reduce resource lookup delay by augmenting the overlay routing table with physical neighborhood and resource lookup history information. Aiming to achieve throughput maximization and fairness in P2P systems, we model the peer selection problem as a mathematical optimization problem by using a set of mixed integer linear equations. A study of the model reveals the relationship between peer selection, resource replication and channel assignment on the performance of P2P systems over WMNs. We extend the model by formulating the P2P download problem as chunk scheduling problem. As a novelty, we introduce constraints to model the capacity limitations of the network due to the given routing and channel assignment strategy. Based on the analysis of the model, we propose a new peer selection algorithm which incorporates network load information and multi-path routing capability. By conducting testbed experiments, we evaluate the achievable throughput in multi-channel multi-radio WMNs. We show that the adjacent channel interference (ACI) problem in multi-radio systems can be mitigated, making better use of the available spectrum. Important lessons learned are also outlined in order to design practical channel and channel bandwidth assignment algorithms in multi-channel multi-radio WMNs.

Drastic growth and chaotic deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) in dense urban areas are some of the common issues of many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Wi-Fi users. These issues result in a substantial reduction of the throughput and impede the balanced distribution of bandwidth among the users. Most of these networks are using unmanaged consumer-grade Access Points (APs) and there is no cooperation among them. Moreover, the conventional association mechanism that selects APs with the strongest Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) aggravates this situation. In spite of all these challenges, there is a great opportunity to build cooperative overlay networks among the APs that are owned by different ISPs, companies or individuals in dense urban areas. In fact, ISPs can distribute the resources among their customers in a cooperative fashion using a shared overlay platform which is constructed on top of the existing infrastructures. This approach helps the ISPs with efficient utilization of their resources and promoting the Quality of their Services (QoS). For instance, cooperative association control among the APs of different ISPs enables them to alleviate the drastic impact of interference in populated areas and improves the network throughput. Indeed, all Wi-Fi customers can associate to the APs from different ISPs and it leads to the construction of a large unified WLAN that expands the network coverage, significantly. Moreover, it results in a notable reduction of deployment costs and enhancement of customer satisfaction. Hence, as one of the key contributions of this dissertation, a cooperative framework for fine-grained AP association in dense WLANs is presented. On top of this framework, a thorough formulation and a heuristic solution to solve the aforementioned problems are introduced. The key enabler of the proposed solution is Software Defined Networking (SDN) which not only gives us an exceptional level of granularity but also empowers us to utilize high-performance computing resources and more sophisticated algorithms. Also, over the past few years, some of the largest cellular operators restricted their unlimited data plans and proposed tiered charging plans enforced by either strict throttling or large overage fees. While cellular operators are trying to guarantee the QoS of their services in a cost-effective and profitable manner, WLANs and Wi-Fi Mesh Networks (WMNs) as viable complements can be used to form a multihop backhaul connection between the access and the core networks. Indeed, the utilization of WMNs provides an opportunity to achieve a high network capacity and wide coverage by the employment of inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf products. Moreover, by bridging the WMNs and cellular networks, and the fine-grained traffic engineering of network flows, it is possible to provide a cost-effective Internet access solution for people who cannot afford the high cost of data plans. However, there are certain requirements in terms of QoS for different services over multi-hop backhaul networks. In addition, the process of service provisioning in WMNs incorporates tightly correlated steps, including AP association, gateway selection, and backhaul routing. In most of the prior studies, these steps were investigated as independent NP-hard problems and no unified formulation that considers all these steps (at different tiers of WMNs) has been presented. Hence, as another contribution of this dissertation, a structured and thorough scheme to address the demands of end-users over SDN-aware WMNs is introduced. In contrast to most of the former work, this scheme takes the key characteristics of wireless networks into account, especially for Multi-Channel Multi-Radio WMNs. The proposed solution can be applied to the large-scale scenarios and finds a near-optimal solution in polynomial time. Furthermore, since the presented solution may split the packets of a single flow among multiple paths for routing and there are non-trivial drawbacks for its implementation, a randomized single-path flow routing for SDN-aware WMNs is introduced. The randomized nature of the introduced solution avoids the complexities of implementing a multi-path flow routing and it presents a viable routing scheme that guarantees certain performance bounds. The functionality and performance of all the presented solutions have been assessed through extensive numerical results and real testbed experimentations as a proof of concept. It is important to note that the solutions presented in this dissertation can be utilized to provide a large variety of services for Wi-Fi users, while they guarantee different QoS metrics. / Graduate

Magister Scientiae - MSc / This thesis demonstrates that a situation-aware algorithm improves quality of service on small mesh networks running BATMAN-adv with some mobile nodes. BATMAN-adv is a proactive mesh routing protocol that counts beacons as a link quality metric. BATMAN-adv was modi ed to give more recently received beacons more weight, thereby calculating a more precise indication of the current state of a link that BATMAN-adv can use to forward packets. BATMAN-adv `original' was compared with a situation-aware version in two laboratory test beds with the same voice traffic profile on actual hardware with a realistic voice traffic profile; with controlled transmission rates and buffer sizes to simulate congestion. The second test bed included mesh potatoes, PCs and laptops as mobile nodes. BATMAN-adv achieved better jitter and packet loss than the situation-aware version in the initial, smaller test bed, and average throughput for both versions was almost identical. However, in the second slightly larger test bed, with additional mobile nodes, the situation-aware algorithm performed better than the original BATMAN-adv algorithm for all quality of service metrics, including throughput. Thus the thesis concludes that a situation-aware protocol offers a promising solution to address issues pertaining to mobility, congestion and scalability for voice traffic in mesh networks with mobile nodes. / South Africa

The tremendous growth in the development of wireless networking techniques attracts growing attention to this research area. The ease of development, low installation and maintenance costs and self healing abilities are some of the qualities that make the multi-hop wireless mesh network a promising solution for both - rural and urban environments. Examining the performance of such a network, depending on the external conditions and the applied routing protocol, is the main aim of this research. It is addressed in an empirical way, by performing repetitive multistage network simulations followed by a systematic analysis and a discussion. This research work resulted in the implementation of the experiment and analysis tools, a comprehensive assessment of the simulated routing protocols - DSDV, AODV, OLSR and HWMP, and numerous observations concerning the simulation tool. Among the major findings are: the suitability of protocols for wireless mesh networks, the comparison of rural and urban environments and the large impact of conditions such as propagation, density and scale of topology on the network performance. An unexpected but valuable outcome is the critical review of the ns network simulator. / Mobile number: +48 660144055

Mesh network is gaining importance as the next generation network for many high speed applications such as multimedia streaming. This is because it is easy and inexpensive to setup mesh networks with mobile and PDA devices and can be used as a private network. Hence research is active in the field of routing protocols and routing metrics to improve the mesh network performance. Though most of the protocols are evaluated based on simulation, we implemented protocols based on a few metrics like Expected Transmission Count (ETX) Per-hop Packet Pair Delay (Pkt Pair) and WCETT (Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmitted Time) to investigate the performance of the network through experiments. An advanced version of DSR protocol called LQSR (Link Quality Source Routing) protocol of Microsoft Research along with MCL (Mesh Connectivity Layer) allows multiple heterogeneous adapters to be used in mesh network. Since wireless adapters of 802.11a standard offer 12 non-interfering channels and 802.11b/g standard offer 3 non-interfering channels, using multiple adapters of different bands operating on non-interfering channels to improve capacity and robustness of mesh networks was also investigated. In this thesis we explore the possibility of increasing the coverage area of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) to enhance the capacity of WMN and minimize the problems due to interference. Theoretical achievable capacity to every node in a random static wireless ad-hoc network with ideal routing is known to be where n is the total number of nodes in the network. Therefore, with increasing number of nodes in a network, throughput drops significantly. Our measurements show that throughput in a single WMN for different path length is closer to the throughput with nodes across two WMNs of the same path length. We propose to interconnect the networks by using multiple wireless adapters in a gateway node configured with the SSID of the networks in operation. We exploit the DSR protocol feature of assigning locally unique interface indices to its adapters. Performance of a network depends heavily on the metrics used for routing packets. Different metrics were studied in the thesis by setting up a 10-node testbed with a combination of nodes with single and two radios. Testbed was partitioned into two networks with two gateway nodes. Performance of multi-radio performance with the above metrics was compared with baseline single radio nodes in the network with the same metric. It is found that multi-radio nodes out-perform single radio nodes in the multi-hop scenario. Also, operating multi-mesh networks using multiple interfaces configured to those networks in a gateway node increases the coverage area and robustness without loss of performance.

Au cours des dernières années, l’utilisation des téléphones portables et tablettes s’est vue croitre de façon significative. De plus, la disponibilité et l’ubiquité de l’accès sans fil a permis de créer un environnement dans lequel les utilisateurs partout où ils sont accèdent en tout temps à des services se trouvant dans le cloud. Cet environnement appelé cloud sans fil consomme une quantité d’énergie significative et est responsable d’émissions considérables en carbone. Cette consommation massive d’énergie et émissions en carbone deviennent un problème majeur dans le secteur des technologies de la communication. Dans ce contexte, nous nous intéressons dans cette thèse à la réduction de la consommation d’énergie et des empreintes en carbone des réseaux d’accès de type mesh et réseaux de campus ainsi que les data centers des infrastructures cloud. Dans la première partie, nous nous intéressons aux réseaux mesh de type TDMA. Nous proposons des solutions pour le problème de routage et ordonnancement des liens qui permettent de réduire la consommation d’énergie dans le réseau. Nous étendons par la suite cette approche pour les réseaux de campus dans un contexte compatible avec le paradigme SDN. Dans la deuxième partie, nous nous intéressons à la réduction de la consommation l’énergie et des empreintes en carbone des infrastructures cloud distribuées, avec des couts variables de l’électricité et d’émission en carbone. Nous proposons des approches d’optimisations dans deux cas de figures : le cas d’un fournisseur cloud souhaitant réduire ses couts et dans le cas où les utilisateurs cloud spécifient des contraintes en carbone sous forme de Green SLA. / Over the last decade, there has been an increasing use of personal wireless devices, such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. The widespread availability of wireless access created an environment in which anywhere at anytime users access data and services hosted in cloud infrastructures. However, such wireless cloud network consumes a non-negligible amount of energy and generates a considerable amount of carbon, which is becoming a major concern in IT industry. In this context, we address the problem of reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint, as well as building green infrastructures in the two different parts of the wireless cloud: (i) wireless access networks including wireless mesh and campus networks, and (ii) data centers in a cloud infrastructure. In the first part of the thesis, we present an energy-efficient framework for joint routing and link scheduling in multihop TDMA-based wireless networks. At a later stage, we extended this framework to cover campus networks using the emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. In the second part of this thesis, we address the problem of reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint of cloud infrastructures. Specifically, we propose optimization approaches for reducing the energy costs and carbon emissions of a cloud provider owning distributed infrastructures of data centers with variable electricity prices and carbon emissions in two different setups: the case of a cloud provider trying to reduce its carbon emissions and operational costs as well as the case where green constraints are specified by the cloud consumers in the form of Green SLAs.

It is well known that the transport layer protocol TCP has low throughput and is unfair in wireless mesh networks. Transport layer solutions for mesh networks have been primarily validated using simulations with simplified assumptions about the wireless network. The WiFu Transport framework complements simulator results by allowing developers to easily create and experiment with transport layer protocols on live networks. We provide a user-space solution that is flexible and promotes code reuse while maintaining high performance and scalability. To validate WiFu Transport we use it to build WiFu TCP, a decomposed Tahoe solution that preserves TCP semantics. Furthermore, we share other WiFu developers' experiences building several TCP variants as well as a hybrid protocol to demonstrate flexibility and code reuse. We demonstrate that WiFu Transport performs as well as the Linux kernel on 10 and 100 Mbps Ethernet connections and over a one-hop wireless connection. We also show that our WiFu TCP implementation is fair and that the framework also scales to support multiple threads.

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