Quality-Based Adaptive Image Transmission in Multihop Wireless Mesh Networks

The emergence of nomadic multimedia applications, such as multimedia conferencing, distance learning, video phones, video/movie-on-demand, and education-on-demand, has recently generated much interest in multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to support diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS). In the existing WMN QoS routing protocols, the methods of bandwidth calculation and allocation were proposed to determine routes with bandwidth guaranteed for QoS applications. This paper studies two NP-hard problems, the maximum bandwidth routing problem (abbreviated to MBRP) and the maximum flow routing problem (abbreviated to MFRP). Given a source node s and a destination node d in a multi-hop wireless mesh network, the MBRP is to determine an s-to-d path that can carry a maximum amount of traffic from s to d and the MFRP is to determine the maximum flow from s to d, both retaining the network bandwidth-satisfied. In this paper, heuristic algorithms for the two problems are proposed. Upper bounds on their optimal values are derived, and a lower bound is derived on the feasible value obtained for the MBRP. With the upper bound and the lower bound, an approximation ratio for the heuristic algorithm of the MBRP is obtained. The effectiveness of the heuristic algorithms is further verified by experiments. A generalized interference model is also discussed.

The continuous growth in user demand for high-quality rich media services puts pressure on Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) resources. Solutions such as those which increase the capacity of the mesh network by equipping mesh routers with additional wireless interfaces provide better Quality of Service (QoS) for video deliveries, but result in higher overall energy consumption for the network. This paper presents LBIS, a distributed solution which combines the benefits of both load-balancing and interface-shifting in order to enhance QoS levels for video services delivered over multi-hop WMNs, while maintaining low energy consumption levels within the network. Simulation-based results show very good performance of our proposed mechanism in terms of QoS metrics (delay, packet loss), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and energy consumption in mesh network topologies, and with varying video traffic loads and distributions. The results demonstrate how LBIS can increase the QoS for video deliveries by more than 30% at the cost of an insignificant increase of the overall network energy consumption compared to the WMN with multiple radio interfaces without the LBIS adaptation.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has been actively explored for a few years, and the IEEE 802.11 Task Group "s" has recently approved the active 802.11s standard for Wireless local area network (WLAN) mesh networking. To provide differentiated channel access and quality of service (QoS) guarantees for multimedia flows, IEEE 802.11s standard employs enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) as the basic medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this study, the authors focus on modelling and analysing the medium access delay differentiation of EDCA under saturation condition in multi-hop WMNs. The authors develop a three-dimensional Markov chain model to evaluate the medium access delay differentiation of EDCA. In this model, the authors fully consider the performance impact of Request to Send (RTS) frame collisions and data frame collisions and then put forward the pseudo states to distinguish the different back-off procedures induced by these collisions. Using this analytical model, the authors derive the average medium access delay for the flows with different priorities. Comparisons with the simulation results show that the analytical model is extremely accurate.

The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is designed to efficiently facilitate the limited communication bandwidth of wireless channel. This protocol uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism. This mechanism continues suffer from throughput degradation when directly applied in multihop Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). The major reason for this poor performance is due to larger signaling overheads (RTS and CTS signaling packet) introduced in order to forward a single data packet in multihop WMN. This inefficient forwarding operation caused the throughput degradation signifficantly. Therefore, an efficient forwarding operation is proposed in this paper to reduce the amount of signaling overheads which are needed to forward a single packet in multihop WMN. The proposed protocol uses the capability of overhearing in order to forward the data packet from one hop to another hop. This process will continue until the data packet reaches the respective destination. As a result, the enhanced protocol reduces the latency caused by signaling thus improve its throughput in multihop WMN. The multihop network performances are evaluated analytically in terms of throughput and delay. Through the simulation, it is proven that the proposed protocol provides significant improvement in throughput and delay. The results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing IEEE DCF MAC protocol when it is evaluated in multihop WMN.

ITS hybrid Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is special case of WMN containing relatively static mesh points and mobile mesh clients, which may suffer from random variations in channel and network condition and handoff problems due to mobility of mesh clients. This leads to poor performance in multi-hop WMN, especially with conventional non-flexible routing algorithms. To cope with instability of wireless links and fast handoff between mesh points for mobile mesh clients, a cross-layer routing that supports link quality optimization and stable routing is an effective way. The key technology is focusing on the choice of the route metrics. In this paper we propose a novel Link Quality and Stability-aware metric from MAC layer supporting Cross-layer Routing (LQSCR) for hybrid WMN. LQSCR selects the path which has best link quality and highest neighbor stability ratio to forward data. Analysis and simulation results show that LQSCR may achieves better performance in hybrid WMN in terms of end-to-end delay, jitter delay and packet delivery ratio in comparison to shortest path metric.

Multi-constrained quality of service (QoS) routing aims at finding an optimal path that satisfies a set of QoS parameters, as an NP complete problem, which is also a big challenge for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Heuristic algorithms with polynomial and pseudo-polynomial-time complexities are often used to deal with this problem. However, existing solutions, most of which suffered either from excessive computational complexities or from low performance, were proposed only for wired networks and cannot be used directly in wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we propose a novel routing scheme based on mean field annealing (MFA-RS) to solve this problem. MFA-RS first uses a function of two QoS parameters, wireless link’s delay and transmission success rate as the cost function, and then seeks to find a feasible path by MFA. Because MFA-RS uses a set of deterministic equations to replace the stochastic process in simulated annealing (SA) and uses saddle point approximation in the calculation of the stationary probability distribution at equilibrium, the convergence time is much less than the routing scheme based on SA (SA-RS). Simulation results demonstrate that MFA-RS is an effective algorithm and is very fit for WMNs.

A service level agreement (SLA) is part of a contract between a cloud service provider (CSP) and a cloud service user (CSU) which defines and describes different agreed properties of the service. The negotiation of the SLA between a CSU and a CSP is a pivotal process in the SLA life cycle. An SLA may include many negotiable quality of service (QoS) parameters with each QoS parameter having multiple acceptable values. Different combinations of acceptable values for all QoS parameters grow exponentially as number of QoS parameters and their selectable values increase. Manually negotiating for all of the QoS parameters considering their various options can be an erroneous and diligent task with lower utility. In this paper, a time efficient flip-flop negotiation strategy for the SLAs in cloud services is presented. The flip-flop negotiation strategy is based on a time dependent 3D utility function and on a dynamic concession strategy using the polynomial extrapolation of opponent's concession. This negotiation strategy is useful for time-critical cloud services as it operates with a motive of reaching an agreement at earlier time without compromising over the utility level of the agreement. Moreover, a multi-provider concurrent negotiation method is presented in this work using the flip-flop negotiation strategy. Multiple experiments are performed (using the implementation of flip-flop negotiation strategy) to test the presented work. The results of the experiments enforce the validity of the flip-flop negotiation strategy for such cloud services where time is an important factor during the SLA negotiation process.

This paper presents a reliable layered multi-cast with source diversity and inter-source network decoding in wireless mesh networks. The source diversity technique gives path diversity providing a better throughput for layered transmission under hostile environment. For each source, an optimization formulation is set up to find the best transmission route of each transmitting layer. The objectives of the formulation are to maximize a number of transmitting layers and transmission reliability. The source providing the best overall throughput is selected to be the primary source, while the rest will be secondary sources. When the Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantee of some transmitting layers cannot be fulfilled by the primary source, the secondary source with the best QoS parameters is selected to transmit the layer to destinations. The number of secondary sources used for transmissions is increased until the QoS guarantees of all transmitting layers are satisfied or all network resources are utilized. Network coding is deployed to multi-cast layers from the same source for efficient resource usage. Network coding data from different sources can be used together to decode the transmitting data. In other words, at each destination, it needs only a sufficient number of packets from different sources to recover all transmitting data. Simulations with different network topologies show the improvement in throughput and QoS guarantees of layered multi-cast under wireless lossy environment.

For the grid workflow system include a large of candidate services, the activity scheduling in workflow’s ex-ecution base on quality of service (QoS) constraints can pro-vide optimal service for users. This paper established the QoS’s parameter system with applied technology of grid workflow, and introduced the each parameter’s calculation model of activity’s QoS, the grid work-flow’s QoS estimation method based on the basic flow control structures defined by the abstract grid workflow language (AGWL). The experimental results show that the calculation method in this paper can estimate stably QoS parameter values of grid workflow combining with the multi candidate services, and, can provide a reasonable basis for process scheduling based on QoS constraints.

Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a promising new technique for communication with routing protocol designs being critical to the effective and efficient of these WMNs. A common approach for routing traffic in these networks is to select a minimal distance from the source to destination as in wireless networks. Opportunistic Routing (OR) makes use of the broadcasting ability of wireless network and is especially very helpful for WMN because all nodes are static. Our proposed scheme of Multicast Opportunistic Routing (MOR) in WMNs is based on the broadcast transmissions and Learning Automata (LA) to expand the potential candidate nodes that can aid in the process of retransmission of the data. The receivers are required to be in sync with one another in order to avoid duplicated broadcasting of data which is generally achieved by formulating the forwarding candidates according to some LA based metric. The most helpful aspect of this protocol is that it intelligently learns from the past experience and improves its performance. The results obtained via this approach of MOR show that the proposed scheme outperforms some existing schemes and is an improved and more effective version of opportunistic routing in a mesh network.

This paper addresses the issue of supporting quality of service (QoS) parameters in distributed publish-subscribe systems. It advocates that QoS parameters should be handled using the same constructs as other information regarding events, such as their type or content. At the same time, we claim that the use of a consistent set of mechanisms should not preclude to decouple the specification of QoS properties from the specification of type, subject or content-based constraints. We also advocate that QoS parameters should not be embedded on the type or content of the events. We show that some QoS parameters can only be computed in run-time, as they depend on dynamic aspects such as the location of the participants and the system load. The paper proposes a model that supports the decoupling of QoS characterization from the event characterization while, at the same time, offers a uniform treatment of both aspects.

With the rapid growth of functionally identical web services, Quality of Service (QoS) plays vital role for deciding the most suitable services for consumers. Although, QoS for web services has gained extensive attention in the literature, most of the existing efforts are unable to consider the multiperspective QoS of web services. Unlike conventional software paradigms, web services are provided, developed and used by different users such as provider, consumer and broker. As a result, QoS requirements vary from user to user. Existing researches are unable to provide standard solution, which can deal with what service providers, consumers and broker should expose in service description as QoS parameters. Therefore, in this book chapter, a multiperspective PCB-QoS classification of non-functional parameters along with new QoS parameters, i.e. access rate and Overall Aggregated Effective Quality of Service (OAEQoS) is presented. Due to the extensible nature of PCB-QoS classification, it can be extended to accommodate more number of QoS parameters. This QoS classification is based on the idea of partitioning the generic QoS parameters according to multi-user’s perspective. An Average Real Value Sum Method (ARSM) based on default priority constraints is also proposed for ranking of web services that uses the presented QoS classification. With the help of proposed approach, the user can specify the service requirements without taking the hurdle of specifying the weights for each QoS parameter during web service operations. It also prevents the services from malicious service provider to publish the incorrect and inaccurate QoS information. Experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of proposed approach over the existing approach.

In a wireless mesh network (WMN), the traffic is aggregated and forwarded towards the gateways. Strategically placing and connecting the gateways to the wired backbone is critical to the management and efficient operation of a WMN. In this paper, we address the problem of gateways placement, consisting in placing a minimum number of gateways such that quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are satisfied. We propose a polynomial time near-optimal algorithm which recursively computes minimum weighted Dominating Sets (DS), while consistently preserving QoS requirements across iterations. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm using both analysis and simulation, and show that it outperforms other alternative schemes by comparing the number of gateways placed in different scenarios

Recent advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have overcome the drawbacks of traditional wired and ad-hoc networks and now they are seen as a means of allowing last mile communications with quality level assurance in Future Multimedia Systems. However, new routing schemes are needed to provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) support for delay/loss/jitter-sensitive multimedia applications. The well-known OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) protocol with ETX (Expected Transmission Count) metric brings many benefits to the path selection process, but has a drawback with regard to queue availability management, which reduces the system performance. This problem is caused when OLSR-EXT control messages are exchanged and the queues of mesh routers along the end-to-end communication path are overloaded. As a result, multimedia-related packets will suffer from loss/delay/jitter and the overall system performance will decrease. This paper proposes the Optimized Link State Routing-Fuzzy ETX Queue (OLSR-FEQ) protocol to overcome the limitations of OLSR-ETX regarding queue availability, QoS and QoE assurance. OLSR-FEQ optimizes network and user-based parameters by coordinating queue availability, QoS and fuzzy issues in the routing decision process as a way of allocating the best paths for multimedia applications. Performance evaluations were carried out with the Network Simulator (NS-2.34) to show the benefits of the proposed solution when compared with existing routing schemes, namely OLSR-ETX, OLSR-FLC, OLSR-MD and HWMP (IEEE 802.11s standard), regarding QoS (unsuccessful packet delivery and throughput) and QoE (PSNR, SSIM, VQM and MOS) parameters.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service has been a very popular and important application over the Internet. Wireless VoIP also becomes more and more popular due to its features of low cost and convenience. Recently, wireless mesh network has been considered as a good solution for VoIP services since it is easy to deploy and provides a larger area coverage. However, the security and performance are the main challenges. In this work, we focus on the security issues and present a new protocol for securing the voice traffic over the wireless mesh network, including the client authentication, intermediate mesh nodes authentication to ensure secure multi-hop communication, voice traffic confidentiality and secure optimal routing selection by using the probing packets.