Collision Avoidance Geographic P2P-RPL in Multi-Hop Indoor Wireless Networks

In home and building automation applications, wireless sensor devices need to be connected via unreliable wireless links within a few hundred milliseconds. Routing protocols in Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) need to support reliable data transmission with an energy-efficient manner and short routing convergence time. IETF standardized the Point-to-Point RPL (P2P-RPL) routing protocol, in which P2P-RPL propagates the route discovery messages over the whole network. This leads to significant routing control packet overhead and a large amount of energy consumption. P2P-RPL uses the trickle algorithm to control the transmission rate of routing control packets. The non-deterministic message suppression nature of the trickle algorithm may generate a sub-optimal routing path. The listen-only period of the trickle algorithm may lead to a long network convergence time. In this paper, we propose Collision Avoidance Geographic P2P-RPL, which achieves energy-efficient P2P data delivery with a fast routing request procedure. The proposed algorithm uses the location information to limit the network search space for the desired route discovery to a smaller location-constrained forwarding zone. The Collision Avoidance Geographic P2P-RPL also dynamically selects the listen-only period of the trickle timer algorithm based on the transmission priority related to geographic position information. The location information of each node is obtained from the Impulse-Response Ultra-WideBand (IR-UWB)-based cooperative multi-hop self localization algorithm. We implement Collision Avoidance Geographic P2P-RPL on Contiki OS, an open-source operating system for LLNs and the Internet of Things. The performance results show that the Collision Avoidance Geographic P2P-RPL reduced the routing control packet overheads, energy consumption, and network convergence time significantly. The cooperative multi-hop self localization algorithm improved the practical implementation characteristics of the P2P-RPL protocol in real world environments. The collision avoidance algorithm using the dynamic trickle timer increased the operation efficiency of the P2P-RPL under various wireless channel conditions with a location-constrained routing space.

OPTIMAL ADMISSION AND ROUTING WITH CONGESTION-SENSITIVE CUSTOMER CLASSES

This paper considers optimal admission and routing control in multi-class service systems in which customers can either receive quality regular service which is subject to congestion or can receive congestion-free but less desirable service at an alternative service station, which we call the self-service station. We formulate the problem within the Markov decision process framework and focus on characterizing the structure of dynamic optimal policies which maximize the expected long-run rewards. For this, value function and sample path arguments are used. The congestion sensitivity of customers is modeled with class-independent holding costs at the regular service station. The results show how the admission rewards of customer classes affect their priorities at the regular and self-service stations. We explore that the priority for regular service may not only depend on regular service admission rewards of classes but also on the difference between regular and self-service admission rewards. We show that optimal policies have monotonicity properties, regarding the optimal decisions of individual customer classes such that they divide the state space into three connected regions per class.

A Novel Routing Control Technique for the Energy Hole in the Underwater Acoustic Distributed Network

The energy hole is a severe problem for underwater acoustic distributed networks in that it affects the normal operations of the network and shortens the network’s life span. To deal with this problem, a loop-free routing control technique is proposed in this paper. The classical shortest-path routing control method is used to generate multiple disjointed routing tables. The residual energy of the nodes and the changing information of the uplink/downlink matrix are added to the data frames for distribution. The source node specifies the routing path to transmit the data frames based on the changing information, and the relay nodes route the data frames strictly according to the routing path designated by the source node. Besides, the energy consumption of the relay node is saved by replying to the pseudo-ACK frame. Simulation experiments are implemented in four typical scenarios, and the results reflect that the proposed technique could extend the network’s life span by approximately 10% when compared to other mature techniques. Besides, it has no other negative effects on the normal operations of the network.

An Optimal Flow Admission and Routing Control Policy for Resource Constrained Networks

Overloaded network devices are becoming an increasing problem especially in resource limited networks with the continuous and rapid increase of wireless devices and the huge volume of data generated. Admission and routing control policy at a network device can be used to balance the goals of maximizing throughput and ensuring sufficient resources for high priority flows. In this paper we formulate the admission and routing control problem of two types of flows where one has a higher priority than the other as a Markov decision problem. We characterize the optimal admission and routing policy, and show that it is a state-dependent threshold type policy. Furthermore, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to gain more insight into the behavior of the optimal policy under different systems’ parameters. While dynamic programming can be used to solve such problems, the large size of the state space makes it untractable and too resource intensive to run on wireless devices. Therefore, we propose a fast heuristic that exploits the structure of the optimal policy. We empirically show that the heuristic performs very well with an average reward deviation of 1.4% from the optimal while being orders of magnitude faster than the optimal policy. We further generalize the heuristic for the general case of a system with n (n>2) types of flows.