Modeling and proving dynamic behaviors of a routing protocol: A tutorial

With the increasing adoption of Internet of Things technologies for controlling physical processes, their dependability becomes important. One of the fundamental functionalities on which such technologies rely for transferring information between devices is packet routing. However, while the performance of Internet of Things–oriented routing protocols has been widely studied experimentally, little work has been done on provable guarantees on their correctness in various scenarios. To stimulate this type of work, in this article, we give a tutorial on how such guarantees can be derived formally. Our focus is the dynamic behavior of distance-vector route maintenance in an evolving network. As a running example of a routing protocol, we employ routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks, and as the underlying formalism, a variant of linear temporal logic. By building a dedicated model of the protocol, we illustrate common problems, such as keeping complexity in control, modeling processing and communication, abstracting algorithms comprising the protocol, and dealing with open issues and external dependencies. Using the model to derive various safety and liveness guarantees for the protocol and conditions under which they hold, we demonstrate in turn a few proof techniques and the iterative nature of protocol verification, which facilitates obtaining results that are realistic and relevant in practice.

Self-configuring asynchronous sleeping in heterogeneous networks

Nowadays, the heterogeneous wireless nano-network topology becomes a need for diverse applications based on heterogeneous networks composed of regions of different node densities. In Wireless Nano-networks (WNNs), nodes are of nano-metric size and can be potentially dense in terms of neighbouring nodes. Nano-nodes have limited resources in terms of processing, energy and memory capabilities. In nano-network(s), even in a communication range limited to tens of centimeters, thousands of neighbours can be found. We proposed a fine-grained duty-cycling method (sleeping mechanism), appropriate to nanonodes, which aims to reduce the number of receptions seen by a node during data packet routing. The present study reveals the usefulness of implementing the sleeping mechanism in heterogeneous networks, as well as configuring a dynamic awaken duration for nodes based on a density estimation algorithm. We also proposed an algorithm that helps in increasing the reliability of the packet received by the destination node.

Location Dynamic Tabu Routing Protocol for MANETs

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks are currently experiencing a second youth in terms of research interest as well as providing benefits to our society. Clearly, this has been fostered by the wide range of applications that have become actually feasible thanks to the pervasive and increasing presence of smartphones, drones, sensors and other small devices with communication and sensing capability. Aiming to deploy solutions able to self-organize without the need for any infrastructure support, packet routing remains an open and critical research problem. Several routing solutions have been conceived to guarantee delivery and low overhead in this context. A promising approach, trying to limit the information needed and stored in the network, is represented by stateless solutions, a class of solutions not relying on topology state information. However, since they exploit local knowledge, the achieved performance in terms of packet delivery and latency is not always up to expectations. To this aim, we propose a dynamic routing protocol based on a tabu search approach, relying on local network knowledge and in-packet short-term memory to alleviate the local minima problem. A through experimental assessment is conducted, measuring protocol performance under different configurations and profiles, evidencing its benefits.

Spectrum Based Power Management for Congested IoT Networks

With constantly increasing demand in connected society Internet of Things (IoT) network is frequently becoming congested. IoT sensor devices lose more power while transmitting data through congested IoT networks. Currently, in most scenarios, the distributed IoT devices in use have no effective spectrum based power management, and have no guarantee of a long term battery life while transmitting data through congested IoT networks. This puts user information at risk, which could lead to loss of important information in communication. In this paper, we studied the extra power consumed due to retransmission of IoT data packet and bad communication channel management in a congested IoT network. We propose a spectrum based power management solution that scans channel conditions when needed and utilizes the lowest congested channel for IoT packet routing. It also effectively measured power consumed in idle, connected, paging and synchronization status of a standard IoT device in a congested IoT network. In our proposed solution, a Freescale Freedom Development Board (FREDEVPLA) is used for managing channel related parameters. While supervising the congestion level and coordinating channel allocation at the FREDEVPLA level, our system configures MAC and Physical layer of IoT devices such that it provides the outstanding power utilization based on the operating network in connected mode compared to the basic IoT standard. A model has been set up and tested using freescale launchpads. Test data show that battery life of IoT devices using proposed spectrum based power management increases by at least 30% more than non-spectrum based power management methods embedded within IoT devices itself. Finally, we compared our results with the basic IoT standard, IEEE802.15.4. Furthermore, the proposed system saves lot of memory for IoT devices, improves overall IoT network performance, and above all, decrease the risk of losing data packets in communication. The detail analysis in this paper also opens up multiple avenues for further research in future use of channel scanning by FREDEVPLA board.