Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-63).

Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-48).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University,2009. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (p.107-112).

Increasing capacity in wireless mesh networks can be achieved by using multiple channels and radios. By using different channels, two nodes can send packets at the same time without interfering with each other. To utilize diversity of available frequency, a channel assignment scheme is required. Hybrid channel assignment is an interesting approach where at least one radio is tuned to a fixed channel for receiving and the remaining interfaces switch their channels dynamically in order to match the receiving channel at the receiving node. This provides full connectivity, but at the expense of introduced switching costs. Due to hardware limitations it is too costly to switch channels on a per packet basis. Instead, this thesis proposes an anypath routing and forwarding mechanism in order to allow each node along the route to select the best next hop neighbor on a per packet basis. The routing algorithm finds for each destination a set of next hop candidates and the forwarding algorithm considers the state of the channel switch operation when selecting a next hop candidate. Also, in order to allow latency-sensitive packets to be transmitted before other packets, latency-awareness has been introduced to distinguish e.g. VoIP flows from FTP traffic. The ideas have been implemented and tested using real-world experiments, and the results show a significant reduction in latency.

Due to the high availability of cheap hardware, wireless multi-hop networks and in particular Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are becoming popular in more and more contexts. For instance, IEEE 802.11 based WMNs have already started to be deployed as means to provide Internet access to rural areas in the developing world. To lower the cost and increase the coverage in such deployments, the wired network is extended with a wireless backbone of fixed mesh routers. With advances in technology and reduction in price comes also the possibility for more powerful wireless nodes, having multiple radios that allow transmitting on different channels in parallel. To be a successful platform for providing general Internet access, wireless multi-hop networks must provide support for common Internet applications. As most of the applications in the Internet today use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), TCP performance is crucial. Unfortunately, the design of TCP’s congestion control that made it successful in today’s Internet makes it perform less than optimal in wireless multi-hop networks. This is due to, among others, TCP’s inability to distinguish wireless losses from congestion losses. The current trend for operating system designers is also to focus TCP development on high-speed fixed networks, rather than on wireless multi-hop networks. To enable wireless multi hop networks as a successful platform there is therefore a need to provide good performance using TCP variants commonly deployed in the Internet. In this thesis, we develop novel proposals for the network layer in wireless multi-hop networks to support TCP traffic more efficiently. As an initial study, we experimentally evaluate different TCP variants, with and without mobile nodes, in a MANET context. Our results show that TCP Vegas, which does not provoke packet loss to determine available bandwidth, reduces the stress on the network while still providing the same or slightly increased performance, compared to TCP Newreno. We further propose and evaluate packet aggregation combined with aggregation aware multi-path forwarding to better utilize the available bandwidth. IP layer packet aggregation, where small packets are combined to larger ones before sent to the link layer, has been shown to improve the performance in wireless multi-hop networks for UDP and small packet transfers. Only few studies have been made on the impact of packet aggregation on TCP traffic, despite the fact that TCP traffic constitutes the majority of the Internet traffic. We propose a novel aggregation algorithm that is specifically addressing TCP relevant issues like packet reordering, fairness and TCP timeouts. In a typical WMN scenario, the aggregation algorithm increases TCP performance by up to 70 % and decreases round trip time (RTT) by up to 40 %. A detailed evaluation of packet aggregation in a multi radio setting has shown that a naive combination of multi path routing and packet aggregation can cause valuable aggregation opportunities to be lost. Therefore, we propose a novel combined packet aggregation and aggregation aware forwarding strategy that can reduce delay, packet loss and increase TCP performance by around 30 %.

Orientador: Edmundo Roberto Mauro Madeira / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-11T08:18:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Paschoalino_RacheldeCarvalho_M.pdf: 2064052 bytes, checksum: e9b127c3cba93b04b66044600728e3a9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: Devido à facilidade de implantação e gerência, as redes mesh sem fio constituem uma escolha natural para atender a crescente demanda por acesso sem fio com cobertura em larga escala. Formadas por roteadores mesh interligados através de enlaces sem fio, as WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks) fornecem um backbone flexível para diversas aplicações e serviços. Entretanto, os protocolos de roteamento existentes aplicados às WMNs não provêem escalabilidade, reduzindo a vazão conforme o tamanho da rede aumenta. Esta dissertação apresenta um protocolo de roteamento escalável com QoS para WMNs multirádio. Incorporamos uma métrica local de qualidade do enlace e suporte a múltiplos rádios ao protocolo OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing). A métrica de qualidade é usada na seleção de nós especiais de relay, que irão compor as rotas. Variações na métrica de qualidade são tratadas na vizinhança de 1 salto, preservando estabilidade no roteamento. Por sua vez, o uso de múltiplos rádios por nó provê um melhor aproveitamento do espectro sem fio, minimizando a contenção. Essa abordagem simples e escalável permite distribuir o tráfego na rede por caminhos com enlaces de melhor qualidade. Através das simulações realizadas, demonstramos que o protocolo proposto, chamado LQ-OLSR (Link Quality OLSR), traz melhorias expressivas na vazão, atraso e perda de pacotes em relação ao OLSR original, com um aumento mínimo do overhead / Abstract: Due to their deployment and management simplicity, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have become a natural way to fulfill the increasing demand for large area wireless coverage. Formed by mesh routers connected by wireless links, WMNs provide a flexible backbone for various applications and services. Nevertheless, the available routing protocols applied to WMNs suffer from scalability, where throughput decreases as the number of nodes grows. In this thesis, a scalable QoS routing protocol for multi-radio WMNs is proposed. We incorporate a locallink quality metric and multi-radio support in the OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) protocol. The quality metric is used in the selection of relay nodes which will form the routes. Significant changes to link quality metric are treated in l-hop neighborhood, preserving route stability. Using multiple radios in each node allows a better utilization of the wireless spectrum, minimizing contention. This simple and scalable approach permits traffic distribution among better quality links. Simulations were conducted and the results showed expressive performance improvements .concerning throughput, delay and packet loss of the proposed protocol LQ-OLSR (Link Quality OLSR) over the original OLSR, with a minimum overhead increase / Mestrado / Redes de Computadores / Mestre em Ciência da Computação

Wireless mesh networks are communication networks possessing radio nodes with mesh organization structure. They are expected to be widely employed by personal, local, campus and metropolitan area applications. Most of the needed components for the deployment of WMNs; such as ad-hoc network routing protocols, wireless security protocols, IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol are already available, while there are problems sourced from various protocol layers. These problems restrict WMNs from serving their potential. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the WMN routing mechanisms with respect to several performance indicators and to determine the routing protocols, which maintain scalable, robust and efficient operation. The performance of B.A.T.M.A.N (Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) protocol is compared to conventional AODV and OLSR protocols in addition to an experimental wireless MPLS routing mechanism (LWMPLS). The OMNeT++ simulation environment helps to determine the performance of routing mechanisms throughout our tests. The simulation results point out that B.A.T.M.A.N protocol performs stable routing in networks with varying link qualities or failing nodes. It has low packet loss rate even when it is employed in environments with extremely high thermal noise, therefore B.A.T.M.A.N is foreseen to become one of the most popular routing mechanisms of WMNs. / +46 (0)739554313

When using Voice over IP (VoIP) in Wireless Mesh Networks the overhead induced by the IEEE 802.11 PHY and MAC layer accounts for more than 80% of the channel utilization time, while the actual payload only uses 20% of the time. As a consequence, the Voice over IP capacity is very low. To increase the channel utilization efficiency and the capacity several IP packets can be aggregated in one large packet and transmitted at once. This paper presents a new hop-by-hop IP packet aggregation scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks. The size of the aggregation packets is a very important performance factor. Too small packets yield poor aggregation efficiency; too large packets are likely to get dropped when the channel quality is poor. Two novel distributed protocols for calculation of the optimum respectively maximum packet size are described. The first protocol assesses network load by counting the arrival rate of routing protocol probe messages and constantly measuring the signal-to-noise ratio of the channel. Thereby the optimum packet size of the current channel condition can be calculated. The second protocol, which is a simplified version of the first one, measures the signal-to-noise ratio and calculates the maximum packet size. The latter method is implemented in the ns-2 network simulator. Performance measurements with no aggregation, a fixed maximum packet size and an adaptive maximum packet size are conducted in two different topologies. Simulation results show that packet aggregation can more than double the number of supported VoIP calls in a Wireless Mesh Network. Adaptively determining the maximum packet size is especially useful when the nodes have different distances or the channel quality is very poor. In that case, adaptive aggregation supports twice as many VoIP calls as fixed maximum packet size aggregation.

Increasing capacity in wireless mesh networks can be achieved by using multiple channels and radios. By using different channels, two nodes can send packets at the same time without interfering with each other. To utilize diversity of available frequency, typically cards use channel-switching, which implies significant overhead in terms of delay. Assignment of which channels to use needs to be coupled with routing decisions as routing influences topology and traffic demands, which in turn impacts the channel assignment. Routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks differ from routing algorithms that are used in wired networks. In wired networks, the number of hops is usually the only metric that matters. Wireless networks, on the other hand, must consider the quality of different links, as it is possible for a path with a larger amount of hops to be better than a path with fewer hops. Typical routing protocols for wireless mesh networks such as Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) use a single path to send packets from source to destination. This path is precomputed based on link state information received through control packets. The consideration of more information than hop-count in the routing process has shown to be beneficial as for example link quality and physical layer data rate determines the quality of the end-to-end path. In multi-channel mesh networks, also channel switching overhead and channel diversity need to be considered as a routing metric. However, a major drawback of current approaches is that a path is precomputed and used as long as the path is available and shows a good enough metric. As a result, short term variations on link quality or channel switching are not considered. In this thesis, a new routing protocol is designed that provides a set of alternative forwarding candidates for each destination. To minimize delay (from both transmission and channel switching), a forwarding mechanism is developed to select one of the available forwarding candidates for each packet. The implementation was tested on an ARM based multi-radio platform, of which the results show that in a simple evaluation scenario the average delay was reduced by 22 % when compared to single path routing.

Autonomous Mesh Networks potentially allows for cheaper networks, of use for impoverished areas with poor infrastructure and little interest from service providers for expansion. The subject of wireless mesh networks is interesting for several reasons. Non-reliance, or at the very least reduced reliance on existing infrastructure and service providers gives more control of a network to the users and their communities. These kinds of networks are however conceived to be quite complex to set up, manage and maintain. The goal of this paper was to create an autonomous network without any need for infrastructure, that was relatively easy to configure, use, and performs well. The implementation technique used succeeds at reaching these goals. The script and environment that was constructed makes it easy to set up and join nodes into the network, and the network can increase and decrease in size without affecting the core functionality of the network. The implementation for automatic host discovery makes it simple for anyone with a small amount of knowledge to find and communicate with other hosts, and the network has proven to be resilient to some common ways of tampering.