Person:

Zegura, Ellen W.

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/71879

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Organizational Unit

School of Computer Science

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 16

Message Ferries as Generalized Dominating Sets in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009) Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Polat, Bahadir K. ; Sachdeva, Pushkar ; Zegura, Ellen W.

Message ferrying is a technique for routing data in wireless and mobile networks in which one or more mobile nodes are tasked with storing and carrying data between sources and destinations. To achieve connectivity between all nodes, message ferries may need to relay data to each other. While useful as a routing technique for wireless mobile networks in general, message ferrying is particularly useful in intermittently connected networks where traditional MANET routing protocols are not usable. A wireless and mobile network is said to possess intrinsic message ferrying capability if a subset of the nodes can act as message ferries by virtue of their own mobility pattern, without introducing additional nodes or modifying existing node mobility. Our goal in this work is to provide a formalism by which one can characterize intrinsic message ferrying capability. We first observe that the use of message ferries is the mobile generalization of the well-known use of connected dominating set-based routing in wireless networks. We next consider the problem of identifying the set of nodes in a mobile network which can act as message ferries by virtue of their mobility pattern. To this end, we define the concept of a connected message ferry dominating set (CMFDS) in a manner that achieves data delivery within certain performance bounds. We then develop algorithms that can be used to find such a set within a mobile, wireless network. The general CMFDS algorithm is built around a core algorithm that determines whether a single node in the network can act as a ferry. We provide some illustrative examples to show the application of our algorithm to several mobility patterns.
Multicasting in Delay Tolerant Networks: Semantic Models and Routing Algorithms

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006) Zhao, Wenrui ; Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Zegura, Ellen W.

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a class of emerging networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions. These networks have a variety of applications in situations such as crisis environments and deep-space communication. In this paper, we study the problem of multicasting in DTNs. Multicast supports the distribution of data to a group of users, a service needed for many potential DTN applications. While multicasting in the Internet and mobile ad hoc networks has been studied extensively, due to the unique characteristic of frequent partitioning in DTNs, multicasting in DTNs is a considerably different and challenging problem. It not only requires new definitions of multicast semantics but also brings new issues to the design of routing algorithms. In this paper, we propose new semantic models for DTN multicast and develop several multicast routing algorithms with different routing strategies. We present a framework to evaluate these algorithms in DTNs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of multicasting in DTNs. Our objectives are to understand how routing performance is affected by the availability of knowledge about network topology and group membership and to guide the design of DTN routing protocols. Using ns simulations, we find that efficient multicast routing for DTNs can be constructed using only partial knowledge. In addition, accurate topology information is generally more important in routing than up-to-date membership information. We also find that routing algorithms that forward data along multiple paths achieve better delivery ratios, especially when available knowledge is limited.
Hierarchical Power Management in Disruption Tolerant Networks with Traffic-Aware Optimization

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006) Jun, Hyewon ; Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Corner, Mark D. ; Zegura, Ellen W.

Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless mobile networks that are characterized by frequent partitions and long delays. Such networks can be used in highly-challenged environment in which energy resources are limited. Efficient power management, therefore, is essential for their success. In this paper, we present a hierarchical power management in DTNs where nodes are equipped with two complementary radios: a long-range, high power radio and a short range, low-power radio. In this architecture, energy can be conserved by using the low-power radio to discover communication opportunities with other nodes and then wake up the high-power radio to undertake the data transmission. We develop a generalized power management framework and its variations around this idea and evaluate their relative performance. In addition, for the case in which traffic load can be predicted, we devise approximation algorithms to control the sleep/wake-up cycling to provide maximum energy conservation while discovering enough communication opportunities to handle a given traffic load. We evaluate our schemes and our choice of parameters through ns-2 simulations. Our simulation results show that the generalized power management mechanism could augment the usefulness of the low power radio and achieve better energy efficiency than mechanisms relying on one radio for discovery. In addition, our approximation algorithms reduce energy consumption from 73% to 93% compared with the case without power management. We also observe that while an additional low power radio does reduce the energy consumption needed for discovery, the improvement could be negligible in mobile DTNs due to the low density of nodes.
RouteSeer: Topological Placement of Nodes in Service Overlays

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006) Srinivasan, Sridhar ; Zegura, Ellen W.

Overlay networks are being increasingly used to deploy new services on the Internet. As opposed to peer-to-peer overlays, these infrastructure or service overlays offer the opportunity of placing the overlay nodes and selecting the links between them. There has been very little work done in the area of node placement in overlay network design. In this work, our objective is to study the overlay node placement problem based on a specific performance objective, namely, overlay link resiliency. An overlay link is called resilient if there exists an intermediate overlay node through which a connection can be established even if there is a failure in the underlying network links between the overlay nodes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, called RouteSeer, to solve the overlay node placement problem. We split the problem into two parts, placing some overlay nodes called client proxies “close” to the clients of the overlay service and placing intermediate nodes to provide resilient paths between the client proxies. RouteSeer heuristically places the intermediate overlay nodes by only examining the routing tables at the client proxies and does not require global topology information. In our simulations and experiments on the Internet, we show that RouteSeer can improve on previous schemes by 50-100%.
Capacity Enhancement Using Throw-Boxes in Mobile Delay Tolerant Networks

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006) Zhao, Wenrui ; Chen, Yang ; Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Corner, Mark D. ; Levine, Brian ; Zegura, Ellen W.

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a class of emerging networks that are subject to frequent and long-duration partitions. Due to intermittent connectivity, DTNs might be significantly limited in supporting application needs, for example, leading to low throughput or high delay. To address this problem, we propose the use of throw-boxes to improve data delivery performance. Throw-boxes are small, inexpensive devices equipped with wireless interfaces and deployed to relay data between mobile nodes. Being small and inexpensive, throwboxes represent a flexible and cost-effective approach to enhance network capacity. In this paper, we systematically study two inter-related issues, namely deployment and routing, in using throw-boxes for throughput enhancement. Specifically, we develop algorithms for throw-box deployment and data forwarding under various routing strategies, including single path, multi-path and epidemic routing. Using extensive ns simulations, we evaluate the utility of throw-boxes and the impact of various routing and deployment strategies on network performance. Our objective is to guide the design and operations of throw-box-enhanced DTNs. We find that throw-boxes are very effective in improving both data delivery ratio and delay, especially for multi-path routing and environments with regular node movement.
Interdomain Ingress Traffic Engineering through Optimized AS-Path Prepending

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005) Dovrolis, Constantine ; Zegura, Ellen W. ; Gao, Ruomei

In Interdomain Ingress Traffic Engineering (INITE), a "target" Autonomous System (AS) aims to control the ingress link through which the traffic of one or more upstream source networks flows to the target network or to its customers. Currently, there are few methodologies for systematic INITE. In practice, ISPs often attempt to manipulate, mostly in a trial-and-error manner, the AS-Path length attribute of upstream routes through a simple technique known as prepending (or padding). In this paper, we focus on prepending and propose a polynomial-time algorithm (referred to as OPV) that determines the optimal padding for an upstream route at each ingress link of the target network. Specifically given a set of "elephant" source networks for a particular customer of the target network, and a set of maximum load constraints on the ingress links of the latter, OPV determines the minimum padding at each ingress link so that the load constraints are met, when it is feasible to do so. OPV requires as input an AS-Path length estimate from each source to each ingress link. We describe how to estimate this matrix, leveraging the BGP Looking Glass Servers that are abundant today for monitoring interdomain routing. To deal with unavoidable inaccuracies in the AS-Path length estimates, and also to compensate for the generally unknown BGP tie-breaking process in upstream networks, we develop a robust variation (RPV) of the OPV algorithm. We show that RPV manages to identify a padding vector that meets the given maximum load constraints, when it is feasible to do so, even in the presence of inaccurate AS-Path lengths and unknown BGP tie-breaking behavior.
Trading Latency for Energy in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks using Message Ferrying

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Zhao, Wenrui ; Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Zegura, Ellen W. ; Lee, Chungki ; Jun, Hyewon

Power management is a critical issue in wireless ad hoc networks where the energy supply is limited. In this paper, we investigate a routing paradigm, Message Ferrying (MF), to save energy while trading off data delivery delay. In MF, special nodes called ferries move around the deployment area to deliver messages for nodes. The reliance on the movement of ferries to deliver data increases the delivery delay. However, nodes can save energy by disabling their radios when ferries are far away. To exploit this feature, we present a power management framework, in which nodes switch their power management modes based on the knowledge of ferry location. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using ns-2 simulations and compare it with Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). Our simulation results show that MF achieves energy savings as high as 95% compared to DSR without power management and still delivers more than 98% of data. In contrast, a power-managed DSR delivers much less data than MF to achieve similar energy savings. In the scenario of heavy traffic load, the power-managed DSR delivers less than 20% of data. MF also shows robust performance for highly mobile nodes, while the performance of DSR suffers significantly. Thus, delay tolerant applications should use MF rather than a multihop routing protocol to save energy efficiently when both routing approaches are available.
Scheduling Uplink Bandwidth in Application-layer Multicast Trees

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Srinivasan, Sridhar ; Zegura, Ellen W.

Many applications can benefit from the use of multicast to distribute content efficiently. Due to the limited deployment of network-layer multicast, several application-layer multicast schemes have been proposed. In these schemes, the nodes in the multicast tree are end systems which are typically connected to the network by a single access link. Transmissions to the children of a node in the multicast tree have to share this single uplink, a factor largely ignored by previous work.In this work, we examine the effect of access link scheduling on the latency of content delivery in a multicast tree. Specifically, we examine the general case where multiple packets (comprising a block of data) are sent to each child in turn. We provide an analytical relation to compute the latency at a node in the multicast tree and show the relationship to the packet size and block size used to transfer data.We propose heuristics for tree construction which take link serialization into account. We evaluate this effect using simulations and experiments on the Planet- Lab network and show that using larger block sizes to transfer data can reduce the average finish time of the nodes in the multicast tree at the expense of slightly increased variance.
The Energy-Limited Capacity of Wireless Networks

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Zegura, Ellen W. ; Zhao, Wenrui

The performance of large-scale wireless ad hoc networks is often limited by the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium and the inherent node energy constraints. While the impact of the former on network capacity has been studied extensively in the literature, the impact of energy constraints has not received as much attention. In this paper, we study the capacity limitations resulting from the energy supplies in wireless nodes. We define the energy-limited capacity of a wireless network as the maximum amount of data the network can deliver before the nodes run out of energy. This energy-limited capacity is an important parameter in networks where operating lifetime is critical, such as ad hoc networks deployed in hazardous environments and sensor networks. We study two types of static networks, networks without any infrastructure support and networks where base stations with unlimited energy are deployed to support data forwarding. We consider two kinds of traffic models motivated by ad hoc networks and sensor networks. We derive upper and lower bounds on the energy-limited capacity of these networks. While throughput has been shown to not scale with node density in static networks by previous studies, our results show that, depending on the energy consumption characteristics of wireless communication, the energy-limited capacity can scale well under both traffic models. In addition, we show that the deployment of base stations can improve the energy-limited capacity of the network, especially for networks with sensor traffic.
Routing in Space and Time in Networks with Predictable Mobility

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Zegura, Ellen W. ; Merugu, Shashidhar

We consider the problem of routing in emerging wireless networks where nodes move around explicitly carrying messages to facilitate communication in an otherwise partitioned network. The absence of a path at any instant of time between a source and destination makes the traditional mobile ad hoc routing protocols unsuitable for these networks. However, the explicit node movements create paths over time that include the possibility of a node carrying a message before forwarding to another suitable node. Identifying such paths over space and time is a key challenge in these store, carry and forward networks. In most of these networks, the mobility of nodes is predictable either over a finite time horizon or indefinitely due to periodicity in node motion. We propose a new space-time routing framework for these networks leveraging the predictability in node motion. Specifically, we construct space-time routing tables where the next hop node is selected from the current as well as the future neighbors. Unlike traditional routing tables, our space-time routing tables use both the destination and the arrival time of message to determine the next hop node. We devise an algorithm to compute these space-time routing tables to minimize the end-to-end message delivery delay. Our routing algorithm is based on a space-time graph model derived from the mobility of nodes. We empirically evaluate our approach using simulations and observe improved performance as compared to other approaches based on heuristics.