Context-Aware Adaptive Opportunistic Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks

Zhao, Zhongliang (2014). Context-Aware Adaptive Opportunistic Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks. (Dissertation, Universität Bern, Philosophisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät)

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Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing attention for decades due to their broad civilian and military applications. Basically, a MANET or WSN is a network of nodes connected by wireless communication links. Due to the limited transmission range of the radio, many pairs of nodes in MANETs or WSNs may not be able to communicate directly, hence they need other intermediate nodes to forward packets for them. Routing in such types of networks is an important issue and it poses great challenges due to the dynamic nature of MANETs or WSNs. On the one hand, the open-air nature of wireless environments brings many difficulties when an efficient routing solution is required. The wireless channel is unreliable due to fading and interferences, which makes it impossible to maintain a quality path from a source node to a destination node. Additionally, node mobility aggravates network dynamics, which causes frequent topology changes and brings significant overheads for maintaining and recalculating paths. Furthermore, mobile devices and sensors are usually constrained by battery capacity, computing and communication resources, which impose limitations on the functionalities of routing protocols. On the other hand, the wireless medium possesses inherent unique characteristics, which can be exploited to enhance transmission reliability and routing performance. Opportunistic routing (OR) is one promising technique that takes advantage of the spatial diversity and broadcast nature of the wireless medium to improve packet forwarding reliability in multihop wireless communication. OR combats the unreliable wireless links by involving multiple neighboring nodes (forwarding candidates) to choose packet forwarders. In opportunistic routing, a source node does not require an end-to-end path to transmit packets. The packet forwarding decision is made hop-by-hop in a fully distributed fashion. Motivated by the deficiencies of existing opportunistic routing protocols in dynamic environments such as mobile ad-hoc networks or wireless sensor networks, this thesis proposes a novel context-aware adaptive opportunistic routing scheme. Our proposal selects packet forwarders by simultaneously exploiting multiple types of cross-layer context information of nodes and environments. Our approach significantly outperforms other routing protocols that rely solely on a single metric. The adaptivity feature of our proposal enables network nodes to adjust their behaviors at run-time according to network conditions. To accommodate the strict energy constraints in WSNs, this thesis integrates adaptive duty-cycling mechanism to opportunistic routing for wireless sensor nodes. Our approach dynamically adjusts the sleeping intervals of sensor nodes according to the monitored traffic load and the estimated energy consumption rate. Through the integration of duty cycling of sensor nodes and opportunistic routing, our protocol is able to provide a satisfactory balance between good routing performance and energy efficiency for WSNs.

Item Type:	Thesis (Dissertation)
Division/Institute:	08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Computer Science (INF) > Communication and Distributed Systems (CDS) 08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Computer Science (INF)
UniBE Contributor:	Zhao, Zhongliang, Braun, Torsten
Subjects:	000 Computer science, knowledge & systems 500 Science > 510 Mathematics
Language:	English
Submitter:	Dimitrios Xenakis
Date Deposited:	23 Jul 2014 16:32
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 14:36
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/54568