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We develop and analyze new cooperative strategies for ad hoc networks that are more spectrally efficient than classical decode & forward (DF) protocols. Using analog network coding, our strategies preserve the practical half-duplex assumption but relax the orthogonality constraint. The introduction of interference due to non-orthogonality is mitigated thanks to precoding, in particular dirty paper coding. Combined with smart power allocation, our cooperation strategies allow to save time and lead to a more efficient use of the bandwidth and to improved network throughput with respect to classical repetition-DF and parallel-DF. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a novel scalable reinforcement learning approach for simultaneous routing and spectrum access in wireless ad-hoc networks. In most previous works on reinforcement learning for network optimization, the network topology is assumed to be fixed, and a different agent is trained for each transmission node—this limits scalability and generalizability. Further, routing and spectrum access are typically treated as separate tasks. Moreover, the optimization objective is usually a cumulative metric along the route, e.g., number of hops or delay. In this paper, we account for the physical-layer signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in a wireless network and further show that bottleneck objective such as the minimum SINR along the route can also be optimized effectively using reinforcement learning. Specifically, we propose a scalable approach in which a single agent is associated with each flow and makes routing and spectrum access decisions as it moves along the frontier nodes. The agent is trained according to the physical-layer characteristics of the environment using a novel rewarding scheme based on the Monte Carlo estimation of the future bottleneck SINR. It learns to avoid interference by intelligently making joint routing and spectrum allocation decisions based on the geographical location information of the neighbouring nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a mobile radio-frequency identification (RFID) system, tagged items enter and leave the reader’s field at a constant speed. The possibility of tags leaving the reader’s interrogation zone without being identified is known as tag loss. Minimizing the tag loss ratio in the presence of random denial-of-service (DoS) attacking signals by optimizing the number of frames is investigated in this paper. The results show that the number of frame control is not needed to reduce the tag loss ratio if the tag entering rate is below a critical limit. The number of frames has to abruptly reduce to keep the tag loss ratio lower if the tag entering rate exceeds that critical limit. This critical limit of the tag entering rate is derived analytically. An analytical solution of the optimum number of frames in the presence of attacking signals that also minimize the tag loss ratio is devised. The technique for setting the optimum number of frames is also presented. The presented results in this paper with random DoS attacking signals is so general that those can be converted without DoS attacking signals by setting the DoS attacking signals equal to zero. The results of this paper can be used for mobile RFID system design with and without DoS attacking signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a stochastic geometry approach to quantify the ergodic rate of each user in an outdoor mm-wave ad hoc network. For a variety of use cases, it is reasonable to assume users will be clustered around a central point (e.g., WiFi hotspot or clusterhead) rather than uniformly distributed. Our results indicate that, in contrast to sub-6-GHz networks, clustered mm-wave ad hoc networks tolerate the increased interference because directional antenna arrays reduce the interference. For certain antenna array configurations and user densities, uncoordinated users within a cluster outperform TDMA. Additionally, we derive a scaling law for uniform mm-wave ad hoc networks and propose a heuristic scaling for clustered networks. The per user ergodic rate remains constant if mm-wave antenna arrays scale sub-linearly with the number of users for uniform networks or linearly in clustered networks as users are added to the cluster. Last, we compute expressions that quantify the loss in ergodic rate per user when alignment error occurs at the receiver and transmitter. Our results show that even relatively small errors in alignment can lead to significant ergodic rate reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The performance of throughput, delay, and their tradeoff in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has been investigated on different assumptions. Nevertheless, few papers consider the supportive infrastructure in MANETs. With the help of supportive infrastructure, i.e., cellular networks, the performance of throughput and delay in MANETs can be improved. The impact of supportive infrastructure on the throughput–delay tradeoff in MANETs is an open research point. In this paper, we are interested in the optimal throughput–delay tradeoff in MANETs with supportive infrastructure. We investigate the supportive infrastructure that only provides transmission pipes between distant nodes. We study the optimal throughput–delay tradeoff in MANETs on different assumptions such as different densities of nodes and base stations (BSs), discrete/continuous mobility models with various velocities, and the fast/slow mobility assumption. We obtain the asymptotically optimal throughput–delay tradeoff and propose transmission policies based on random linear coding (RLC) to achieve the optimal throughput–delay tradeoff asymptotically. From the obtained optimal throughput–delay tradeoff, we find that supportive infrastructure reduces the delay bound from velocity, which is a lower bound of delay caused by nodes' velocity. In particular, if supportive infrastructure can cover the entire network, then the delay bound from velocity vanishes when per-node throughput does not exceed a threshold. Moreover, we find that there also exists a delay bound from the transmission range of the instant transmission. In addition, we observe that, for the optimal throughput–delay tradeoff in the large throughput region, the case in the continuous mobility model outperforms the case in the discrete mobility model, and the case on the slow mobility assumption outperforms the case on the fast mobility assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is well known that the data transport capacity of a wireless network can be increased by leveraging the spatial and frequency diversity of the wireless transmission medium. This has motivated the recent surge of research in cooperative and dynamic-spectrum-access (which we also refer to as cognitive spectrum access) networks. Still, as of today, a key open research challenge is to design distributed control strategies to dynamically jointly assign: 1) portions of the spectrum and 2) cooperative relays to different traffic sessions to maximize the resulting network-wide data rate. In this paper, we make a significant contribution in this direction. First, we mathematically formulate the problem of joint spectrum management and relay selection for a set of sessions concurrently utilizing an interference-limited infrastructure-less wireless network. We then study distributed solutions to this (nonlinear and nonconvex) problem. The overall problem is separated into two subproblems: 1) spectrum management through power allocation with given relay selection strategy; and 2) relay selection for a given spectral profile. Distributed solutions for each of the two subproblems are proposed, which are then analyzed based on notions from variational inequality (VI) theory. The distributed algorithms can be proven to converge, under certain conditions, to VI solutions, which are also Nash equilibrium (NE) solutions of the equivalent NE problems. A distributed algorithm based on iterative solution of the two subproblems is then designed. Performance and price of anarchy of the distributed algorithm are then studied by comparing it to the globally optimal solution obtained with a newly designed centralized algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed algorithm achieves performance that is within a few percentage points of the optimal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we investigate the impact of information-theoretic secrecy constraint on the capacity and delay of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with mobile legitimate nodes and static eavesdroppers whose location and channel state information (CSI) are both unknown. We assume n legitimate nodes move according to the fast i.i.d. mobility pattern and each desires to communicate with one randomly selected destination node. There are also n^\nu static eavesdroppers located uniformly in the network and we assume the number of eavesdroppers is much larger than that of legitimate nodes, i.e., \nu>1. We propose a novel simple secure communication model, i.e., the secure protocol model, and prove its equivalence to the widely accepted secure physical model under a few technical assumptions. Based on the proposed model, a framework of analyzing the secrecy capacity and delay in MANETs is established. Given a delay constraint D, we find that the optimal secrecy throughput capacity is \widetilde\Theta(W((D/n))^(2/3)), where W is the data rate of each link. We observe that: 1) the capacity-delay tradeoff is independent of the number of eavesdroppers, which indicates that adding more eavesdroppers will not degenerate the performance of the legitimate network as long as \nu>1; 2) the capacity-delay tradeoff of our paper outperforms the previous result \Theta((1/n\psie)) in refid="ref11"/, where \psie=n^{\nu-1}=\omega(1) is the density of the eavesdroppers. Throughout this paper, for functions f(n) and g(n), we denote f(n)=o(g(n)) if \limn\rightarrow\infty(f(n)/g(n))=0; f(n)=\omega(g(n)) if g(n)=o(f(n)); f(n)=O(g(n)) if there is a positive constant c such that f(n)\leq cg(n) for sufficiently large n; f(n)=\Omega(g(n)) if g(n)=O(f(n)); f(n)=\Theta(g(n)) if both f(n)=O(g(n)) and f(n)=\Omega(g(n)) hold. Besides, the order notation \widetilde\Theta omits the polylogarithmic factors for better readability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hop count distribution (HCD), generally formulated as a discrete probability distribution of the hop count, constitutes an attractive tool for performance analysis and algorithm design. This paper devotes to deriving an analytical HCD expression for a finite ad hoc network under the minimum hop-count routing protocols. Formulating the node distribution with binomial point process, the network is provided as a bounded area with all nodes randomly and uniformly distributed. Considering an arbitrary pair of source node (SN) and destination node, an innovative and straightforward definition is presented for HCD. In order to derive HCD out, an original mathematical framework, named as the equivalent area replacement method (EARM), is proposed and verified. Under the EARM, HCD is derived by first considering the special case where SN locates at the network center and then extending to the general case where SN is randomly distributed. For each case, the accuracy of our HCD model is evaluated by simulation comparison. Results show that our model matches well with the simulation results over a wide range of parameters. Particularly, the derived HCD outperforms the existing formulations in terms of the Kullback Leibler divergence, especially when SN is randomly distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications are highly promising to improve the capacity of modern wireless networks, while the physical layer security (PLS) techniques hold great potential to enhance the critical secrecy performance therein. By carefully exploiting the significant signal difference between the Non-Light-of-Sight (NLoS) and Line-of-Sight (LoS) mmWave links, this paper proposes a Sight-based Cooperative Jamming (SCJ) scheme to improve the PLS performance of mmWave ad hoc communications. In this scheme, each potential jammer that has no LoS link to its nearest receiver but may have LoS links to eavesdroppers is selected with a certain probability to generate artificial noise such that channel advantages at legitimate receivers can be achieved. For performance modeling of the new jamming scheme, novel and efficient theoretical approximation approaches are firstly developed to enable the challenging issue of interference distribution modeling to be tackled, and then a theoretical framework based on stochastic geometry is proposed to capture the secrecy transmission capacity behavior under the SCJ scheme. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the SCJ scheme under various network scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electromagnetic spectrum resources are a very important resource. With the rapid development of radio technology, electromagnetic spectrum resources have become scarce. Abuse of spectrum resources and interference with primary user often occur. Pre-sensing the electromagnetic environment and performing dynamic spectrum access is the direction of future wireless technology development. This paper focuses on the electromagnetic spectrum information service platform. We design a spectrum detection node in combination with an embedded system. The distributed spectrum detection network is constructed by using the TV White Space as the communication frequency band of the backbone network. From the perspective of signal source, research on detection and identification methods based on radio signal characteristics improves the efficiency of electromagnetic spectrum detection. A phase extreme range estimation method based on radio frequency I/Q data is proposed to improve signal estimation accuracy in a low signal-noise-ratio environment. The interquartile range is proposed to distinguish noise and signal. The experiment results show that distributed electromagnetic spectrum information service platform based on signal characteristics can improve detection accuracy and increase system flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last years, vehicular networking has grown up in terms of interest and transmission capability, due to the possibility of exploiting the distributed communication paradigm in a mobile scenario, where moving nodes are represented by vehicles. The different existing standards for vehicular ad-hoc networks, such as dedicate short range communication (DSRC), wireless access for vehicular environment (WAVE)/IEEE802.11p, have given to the research community the possibility of developing new medium access control (MAC) and routing schemes, in order to enhance the quality and the comfort of mobile users who are driving their vehicles. In this paper, we focus our attention on the optimization of traffic flowing in a vehicular environment with vehicle-2-roadside capability. As shown later, the proposed idea exploits the information that is gathered by road-side units to redirect traffic flows (in terms of vehicles) to less congested roads, with an overall system optimization, also in terms of carbon dioxide emissions reduction. An analytical model, as well as a set of pseudo-code instructions, have been introduced in the paper. A deep campaign of simulations has been carried out to give more effectiveness to our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the need for individualizing vehicular communications in order to improve safety for a highway scenario. Adapting a vehicular ad hoc network to both its individual driver’s characteristic and traffic conditions enables it to transmit in a smart manner to other vehicles. This radical improvement is now possible due to the progress that is being made in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). In this paper, we first derive the packet success probability for a chain of vehicles by taking multi-user interference, path loss, and fading into account. Then, by considering the delay constraints and types of potential collisions, we approximate the optimal channel access probabilities. Lastly, we propose an algorithm for customizing channel access probabilities in VANET. Our Monte Carlo simulation results show that this approach achieves more than 25% reduction in traffic collision probability compared with the case with equal channel access probabilities in its optimal range. Therefore, it has a huge advantage over other non-optimal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) experience large-scale high-speed mobility and volatile topology. VANETs may therefore experience intermittent connections and may occasionally be unable to guarantee end-to-end connections. This gives the medium access control (MAC) layer the opportunity to adapt its transmission strategy to the current unstable wireless connections to improve transmission efficiency. In this paper, we propose an adaptive frame length aggregation scheme (AFLAS) for VANETs, which is designed to improve transmission efficiency and increase data throughput. In our scheme, the incoming data packets from higher layers are queued separately in the MAC layer to wait for transmission opportunities. Suitable aggregation frame lengths are calculated according to the current wireless status and applied in the MAC layer at the onset of data transmissions. In this paper, we analyze and apply our AFLAS strategy to two current frame aggregation schemes in IEEE 802.11. We also report on the performance evaluation of our scheme. Our results exhibit significant improvement results in data throughput, retransmissions, overheads, and transmission efficiency in comparison with nonadaptive aggregation schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an infrastructure-based wireless network, including mobile users and vehicles, many crucial and important services are provisioned by a centralized server. However, due to damaged infrastructure and increased mobility caused by an emergency, maintaining continuous service coverage in such a network can be challenging. Although several prediction-based replication methods have been proposed to achieve service coverage through replication of the central server, they are unable to accurately predict future topological changes and thus maintain service coverage in a post-emergency network. These topological changes are, in fact, directly related to user mobility. Nevertheless, existing mobility models are unable to realistically represent post-emergency user movements. Consequently, at first, this paper proposes a realistic mobility model that includes users' post-emergency complex behavioral changes. Subsequently, this paper proposes a machine-to-machine (M2M) networking-based service coverage framework for post-emergency environments. The proposed framework performs not only accurate prediction of the proposed user mobility but also optimal replication, utilizing these predictions, of the central server to achieve continuous service coverage. In addition, the framework requires no supervision and fewer resources to perform these functions due to use of the M2M networking. Simulation results are further used to verify the effectiveness of proposals presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) help improve traffic safety and lessen traffic congestion. Roadside units (RSUs) play a key role in serving as the event and data broker in the form of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication to supply wireless and mobile vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Recently, hybrid VANET-sensor networks have attracted much attention as events are detected by sensor nodes and are spread to a wider area via VANETs, in which the number of RSUs is restricted due to high cost. This paper investigates the problem of minimizing the total cost of deploying RSUs and sensor nodes along the two sides and the median island of a two-lane road to cover the whole road, represented as a grid, and to form a connected VANET-sensor network. This problem is NP-complete by reduction to the NP-complete placement problem for a single-lane road. Therefore, this paper formulates the problem as an integer linear program and then proposes a center particle swarm optimization approach, in which a center particle is adopted for increasing the convergence speed. Additionally, a theoretical analysis for the approach is provided. Experimental results show that the approach can perform well for moderate-sized problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a novel scheme for the design of topology-transparent scheduling (TTS) in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), based on the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). TTS can provide each node with guaranteed success in each schedule without any detailed topology information and yields a guaranteed upper bound on the transmission delay of each packet at every node in a MANET. In general, TTS requires two global constraints on the number of nodes in the MANET and the maximum nodal degree of the graph representing connectivity of the MANET. Due to the inherent mobility of MANETs, the maximum nodal degree, however, cannot be available or easily estimated. To eliminate the requirement for the maximum nodal degree, this paper proposes TTS via the CRT. By the redundancy property of the Chinese remainder representation, the proposed CRT-based scheme not only preserves the advantages of providing guaranteed success in each schedule with only the global constraint on the number of nodes in the MANET, but also offers flexibility in constructing TTS. To have a better transmission delay bound for a node with lower interference, this paper also introduces two threaded counterparts of the proposed CRT-based scheme. This paper provides performance analyses for the proposed CRT-based scheme and its threaded counterparts. Numerical results demonstrate that TTS via the CRT can outperform existing schemes, especially in scenarios with harsh interference, and is a versatile approach for the design of TTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the problem of spectrum-aware routing in a multi-hop, multi-channel cognitive radio network when malicious nodes in the secondary network attempt to block the path with mixed attacks. Based on the location and time-variant path delay information, we model the path discovery process as a non-cooperative stochastic game. By exploiting the structure of the underlying Markov Decision Process, we decompose the stochastic routing game into a series of stage games. For each stage game, we propose a distributed strategy learning mechanism based on stochastic fictitious play to learn the equilibrium strategies of joint relay-channel selection in the condition of both limited information exchange and potential routing-toward-primary attacks. We also introduce a trustworthiness evaluation mechanism based on a multi-arm bandit process for normal users to avoid relaying to the sink-hole attackers. Simulation results show that without the need of information flooding, the proposed algorithm is efficient in bypassing the malicious nodes with mixed attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cognitive radio (CR) networks, the secondary users (SUs) sense the spectrum licensed to the primary users (PUs) to identify and possibly transmit over temporarily unoccupied channels. Cooperative sensing was proposed to improve the sensing accuracy, but in heterogeneous scenarios, SUs do not contribute equally to the cooperative sensing result because they experience different received PU signal quality at their sensors. In this paper, a two-layer cooperative game is developed for distributed sensing and access in multichannel CR ad hoc networks, where the SUs’ transmission opportunities are commensurate with their sensing contributions, thus fostering cooperation and eliminating free-riders. Numerical results show that the proposed two-layer game is computationally efficient and outperforms previously investigated collaborative sensing and spectrum access approaches in heterogeneous multichannel CR scenarios in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, SU fairness, and complexity. Moreover, it is demonstrated that this game is robust to changes in the network topology and the number of SUs. Finally, a new physical-layer approach is proposed to distribute the network-level miss-detection constraints fairly among the interfering SUs for guaranteed PU protection and demonstrate the performance advantages of the AND-rule combining of spectrum sensing results for heterogeneous SUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel approach to assess the performance in terms of end-to-end throughput of an ad hoc multi-hop wireless network, where each link is affected by interference coming from other multi-hop paths nearby. The approach captures the mutual impact of each path on all others. It can be applied to both, contention-based and scheduled, medium access control (MAC) protocols. Sources have data to send to destination nodes through $n$ relays. Nodes are assumed to be uniformly and randomly distributed in the 2-D infinite plane. The model shows the impact on the end-to-end throughput of $n$ ; it also captures the influence of node density, traffic generated, number of retransmissions, and other MAC parameters. Finally, the model provides the throughput-delay tradeoff. Unlike most previous approaches, the mathematical tool proposed appears to be scalable, allowing easy extension to any number of hops. Comparison with simulation results is provided to prove that the impact of the approximations introduced in the analysis is almost negligible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we derive closed-form expressions for significant statistical properties of the link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the separation distance in mobile ad hoc networks subject to Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) mobility and Rayleigh fading. In these systems, the SNR is a critical parameter as it directly influences link performance. In the absence of signal fading, the distribution of the link SNR depends exclusively on the squared distance between nodes, which is governed by the mobility model. In our analysis, nodes move randomly according to an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, using one tuning parameter to control the temporal dependency in the mobility pattern. We derive a complete statistical description of the squared distance and show that it forms a stationary Markov process. Then, we compute closed-form expressions for the probability density function (pdf), the cumulative distribution function (cdf), the bivariate pdf, and the bivariate cdf of the link SNR. Next, we introduce small-scale fading, modeled by a Rayleigh random variable, and evaluate the pdf of the link SNR for rational path loss exponents. The validity of our theoretical analysis is verified by extensive simulation studies. The results presented in this work can be used to quantify link uncertainty and evaluate stability in mobile ad hoc wireless systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), single-objective optimization algorithm has inherited limitations for the feature selection problem with the multiple objectives. Moreover, the imbalanced problem commonly exists in various datasets. Thus, in this paper, a feature selection algorithm based on a many-objective optimization algorithm (FS-MOEA) is proposed for IDSs in VANETs, in which Adaptive Non-dominant Sorting Genetic (A-NSGA-III) serves as the many-objective optimization algorithm. Two improvements, called Bias and Weighted (B&W) niche-preservation and Information Gain (IG)-Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) prioritizing, are further designed in FS-MOEA. The former is used to counterbalance the imbalanced problem in datasets by assigning rare classes higher priorities, while the latter is employed to search the optimal feature subset for FS-MOEA. In IG-AHP prioritizing, a more distinct measurement, i.e. average IG, is used as the dominant factor to guide the decision analysis of AHP. Experimental results show that the proposed FS-MOEA can not only improve the performance of IDSs in VANETs but also alleviate the negative impact of the imbalanced problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks mitigates the negative propagation effects of the wireless channel and increases the sensing reliability. Collaborative sensing requires sensors to share their local spectrum sensing information (SSI) with other users. This paper proposes distributed iterative time slot allocation algorithms for SSI sharing on a dedicated common control channel in a cognitive radio ad hoc network scenario. The proposed algorithms are based on a collision detection and acknowledgment scheme. This scheme allows the network nodes to receive knowledge about collisions regarding their transmitted SSI packets. The nodes use this information to update their operating time slots using a probabilistic approach; each node maintains and updates a parameter representing the probability of switching the time slot in case of a collision. Both fixed and adaptive probability based schemes are proposed. The proposed algorithms are proven to converge to a collision-free allocation with probability one if such an allocation exists. Moreover, an analytical expression for the expected convergence time is established. Extensive simulation results illustrating the rapid convergence, excellent performance, and small reporting overhead of the proposed time slot allocation algorithms are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wireless communication in a network of mobile devices is a challenging and resource-demanding task, due to the highly dynamic network topology and the wireless channel randomness. This paper investigates information broadcast schemes in 2-D mobile ad hoc networks where nodes are initially randomly distributed and then move following a random direction mobility model. Based on an in-depth analysis of the popular susceptible-infectious-recovered epidemic broadcast scheme, this paper proposes a novel energy and bandwidth-efficient broadcast scheme, named the energy-efficient broadcast scheme, which is able to adapt to fast-changing network topology and channel randomness. Analytical results are provided to characterize the performance of the proposed scheme, including the fraction of nodes that can receive the information and the delay of the information dissemination process. The accuracy of analytical results is verified using simulations driven by both the random direction mobility model and a real-world trace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The connectivity of ad hoc networks has been extensively studied in the literature. Most recently, researchers model ad hoc networks with two-dimensional lattices and apply percolation theory for connectivity study. On the lattice, given a message source and the bond probability to connect any two neighbor vertices, percolation theory tries to determine the critical bond probability above which a giant connected component appears. This paper studies a related but different problem, directed connectivity: what is the exact probability of the connection from the source to any vertex following certain directions? The existing studies in math and physics only provide approximation or numerical results. In this paper, by proposing a recursive decomposition approach, we can obtain a closed-form polynomial expression of the directed connectivity of square lattice networks as a function of the bond probability. Based on the exact expression, we have explored the impacts of the bond probability and lattice size and ratio on the lattice connectivity, and determined the complexity of our algorithm. Further, we have studied a realistic ad hoc network scenario, i.e., an urban VANET, where we show the capability of our approach on both homogeneous and heterogeneous lattices and how related applications can benefit from our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future Internet-of-Things (IoT) is expected to wirelessly connect billions of low-complexity devices. For wireless information transfer (IT) in IoT, high density of IoT devices and their ad hoc communication result in strong interference, which acts as a bottleneck on wireless IT. Furthermore, battery replacement for the massive number of IoT devices is difficult if not infeasible, making wireless energy transfer (ET) desirable. This motivates: 1) the design of full-duplex wireless IT to reduce latency and enable efficient spectrum utilization and 2) the implementation of passive IoT devices using backscatter antennas that enable wireless ET from one device (reader) to another (tag). However, the resultant increase in the density of simultaneous links exacerbates the interference issue. This issue is addressed in this paper by proposing the design of full-duplex backscatter communication (BackCom) networks, where a novel multiple-access scheme based on time-hopping spread-spectrum is designed to enable both one-way wireless ET and two-way wireless IT in coexisting backscatter reader-tag links. Comprehensive performance analysis of BackCom networks is presented in this paper, including forward/backward bit-error rates and wireless ET efficiency and outage probabilities, which accounts for energy harvesting at tags, non-coherent and coherent detection at tags and readers, respectively, and the effects of asynchronous transmissions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the problem of broadcasting information in the most efficient manner in a large 2-D ad hoc wireless network at low SNR and under line-of-sight propagation. A new communication scheme is proposed, where source nodes first broadcast their data to the entire network, despite the lack of sufficient available power. The signal’s power is then reinforced via successive back-and-forth beamforming transmissions between different groups of nodes in the network, so that all nodes are able to decode the transmitted information at the end. This scheme is shown to achieve asymptotically the broadcast capacity of the network, which is expressed in terms of the largest singular value of the matrix of fading coefficients between the nodes in the network. A detailed mathematical analysis is then presented to evaluate the asymptotic behavior of this largest singular value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are interdependent increases in vehicle numbers, vehicular traffic congestion, and carbon emissions that cause major problems worldwide. These problems include direct negative influences on people's health, adverse economic effects, negative social impacts, local environmental damage, and risk of catastrophic global climate change. There is a drastic need to develop ways to reduce these emissions and EcoTrec, presented in this paper, is one of these innovative approaches. EcoTrec is a vehicular ad hoc network-based vehicle routing solution designed to reduce vehicle carbon emissions without significantly affecting the travel times of vehicles. The vehicles exchange messages related to traffic and road conditions, such as average speed on the road, road gradient, and surface condition. This information is used to build a fuel efficiency model of the routes, based on which the vehicles are recommended to take more efficient routes. By routing vehicles more efficiently, the greenhouse emissions are reduced while also maintaining low traffic congestion levels. This paper presents results of extensive simulations, which show how EcoTrec outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions with different number of vehicles, vehicle penetration, and compliance rates, and when considering different real world road maps from Dublin and Koln. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider a multi-user scenario where an arbitrary number of sources transmit their messages to the intended destinations by means of relays in a decode-and-forward two-hop mechanism. To minimize the interference generated in the scenario, two opportunistic relay selection mechanisms are proposed and investigated. The performance of the two selection mechanisms is analytically evaluated, in terms of outage probability and average achievable rate, under the assumption that relay nodes are distributed according to a Poisson point process. Asymptotical analysis is also presented for infinite node density. Numerical results show that the selection of the relays has a significant impact on the amount of interference generated and a suitable choice can improve the overall performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing use of shared, unlicensed spectrum bands by medical devices and nonmedical products highlights the need to address wireless coexistence to ensure medical device safety and effectiveness. This paper provides the first step to approximate the probability of a device coexisting in its intended environment by providing a generalized framework for modeling the environment. The application of this framework is shown through an 84-day spectrum survey of the 2.4–2.48 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical band in a hospital environment in the United States. A custom platform was used to monitor power flux spectral density and record received power. Channel utilization of three nonoverlapping channels of 20 MHz bandwidth—relative to IEEE 802.11 channels 1, 6, and 11—were calculated and fitted to a generalized extreme value distribution. Low channel utilization was observed ( $ <$10%) in the surveyed environment with sporadic occurrences of higher channel utilization ($ >$ 50%). Reported findings can be complementary to wireless coexistence testing. This paper can provide input to the development of a consensus standard for wireless device coexistence test methods and a consensus document focused on wireless medical device coexistence risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rendezvous is the fundamental challenge in cognitive radio networks to find each other on a specific channel and establish a communication link. The primary focus of this paper is to design an algorithm for blind rendezvous, i.e., a rendezvous without a coordinator or common control channel. Channels to jump are assumed to be homogeneous in prior work; however, in the real world, channels exhibit different conditions. Therefore, we propose an adaptive jumping pattern such that a superior channel is considered more frequently based on its noise level and users have a greater possibility to rendezvous on such a channel. Furthermore, in this paper, we investigate the rendezvous problem with multiple radio interfaces. When multiple radio interfaces are available for users, the possibility of rendezvous increases; however, the number of channels to jump for each interface may not be the same as other users’ interfaces. We propose an adaptive rendezvous algorithm that can function for multiple interfaces and different sizes of channel lists and an adaptive jumping pattern for different channel conditions. We prove that the proposed algorithm provides guaranteed rendezvous and derive the maximum time-to-rendezvous (TTR), which is also verified via simulation results. Further, our algorithm outperforms jump-and-stay in terms of TTR while enabling users to rendezvous on a better channel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Opportunistic scheduling for a wireless network with hybrid links is studied in this paper. Specifically, two link types are considered: a link of the first type always has a much lower transmission rate than a link of the second type. To avoid starvation in the first type of links, two link types must be treated differently in opportunistic scheduling, and quality of service (QoS) constraints, such as maximum delay or minimum throughput, must be imposed on the first link type. Considering QoS constraints, a distributed opportunistic scheduling scheme is derived based on the optimal stopping theory. Two scenarios are considered for the QoS-oriented opportunistic scheduling scheme. In the first scenario, all links within the same link type follow the same rate distribution. Thus, QoS constraints are imposed on the entire link type. In the second scenario, links of the first type follow heterogeneous rate distributions. Thus, QoS requirements need to be imposed on links with the worst performance. Performance results show that the new opportunistic scheduling scheme outperforms the existing ones in most scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the asymptotic properties of average area spectral efficiency (ASE) of a downlink cellular network in the limit of very dense base station (BS) and user densities. This asymptotic analysis relies on three assumptions: 1) interference is treated as noise; 2) the BS locations are drawn from a Poisson point process; and 3) the path loss function is bounded above satisfying mild regularity conditions. We consider three possible definitions of the average ASE, all of which give units of bits per second per unit bandwidth per unit area. When there is no constraint on the minimum operational signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and instantaneous full channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter, the average ASE is proven to saturate to a constant, which we derive in a closed form. For the other two ASE definitions, wherein either a minimum SINR is enforced or CSI is not available, the average ASE is instead shown to collapse to zero at high BS density. We provide several familiar case studies for the class of considered path loss models, and demonstrate that our results cover most previous models and results on ultradense networks as special cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Densifying networks and deploying more antennas at each access point are two principal ways to boost the capacity of wireless networks. However, the complicated distributions of the signal power and the accumulated interference power, largely induced by various space–time processing techniques, make it highly challenging to quantitatively characterize the performance of multi-antenna networks. In this paper, using tools from stochastic geometry, a unified framework is developed for the analysis of such networks. The major results are two innovative representations of the coverage probability, which make the analysis of multi-antenna networks almost as tractable as the single-antenna case. One is expressed as an $\ell _{1}$ -induced norm of a Toeplitz matrix, and the other is given in a finite sum form. With a compact representation, the former incorporates many existing analytical results on single- and multi-antenna networks as special cases and leads to tractable expressions for evaluating the coverage probability in both ad hoc and cellular networks. While the latter is more complicated for numerical evaluation, it helps analytically gain key design insights. In particular, it helps prove that the coverage probability of ad hoc networks is a monotonically decreasing convex function of the transmitter density and that there exists a peak value of the coverage improvement when increasing the number of transmit antennas. On the other hand, in multi-antenna cellular networks, it is shown that the coverage probability is independent of the transmitter density and that the outage probability decreases exponentially as the number of transmit antennas increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the problem of designing and allocating transmission sequences to users in a mobile ad hoc network that has no spatial boundary. A basic tenet of the transmission sequence approach for addressing media access control (MAC) is that under normal operating conditions, there is no feedback-triggered retransmission. This obviously is a major departure from the Slotted-ALOHA or carrier-sense multiple-access (CSMA)-type approaches. While these traditional solutions enjoy excellent throughput performance, a fundamental drawback is that they are based on feedback information. For systems without a naturally defined central controller that can play the role of a base station, the task of providing feedback information could easily become unmanageable. This highlights the advantage of the feedback-free approach. A second advantage is the ability to handle unlimited spatial coverage. We propose in this paper a concept for MAC that is akin to frequency reuse. However, instead of reusing frequency, the new approach allows transmission sequences to be reused. A study of the transmission sequence approach against other approaches is conducted by comparing the minimal frame lengths that can guarantee the existence of conflict-free transmissions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the rapid development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and software-defined networks technologies, vehicular ad hoc networks have evolved into software-defined Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In software-defined IoV, messages transmitted by vehicles are transferred using wireless communication technology, so attackers can easily attack specific vehicles and Road-Side Units (RSUs) within the wireless communication range. When any vehicle or RSU is under attack or control, the entire network may collapse and produce incorrect computing results, which in the worst case, can lead to car accidents. Therefore, building a highly reliable and fault-tolerant software-defined IoV is of high importance. In this paper, we visit the consensus problem in software-defined IoV. Software-defined IoV is built with infrastructures, that is, RSUs. RSUs have a backhaul capacity and a powerful computing capacity. Thus, in software-defined IoV, we will focus on how to use RSUs to assist vehicles in reaching a consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immediately after the occurrence of a natural disaster, communication infrastructures used in daily life become temporarily unavailable. Under such a situation, intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) play an important role in providing post-disaster networking. While previous studies on such networks have mainly focused on one-to-one messaging applications, the importance of monitoring applications has become increasingly important in recent years. For monitoring applications, the key performance measure is given by the freshness of the information, rather than the traditional delay characteristics. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis of the age of information (AoI) for intermittently connected MANETs, which captures the information freshness of monitoring applications. We further investigate basic principles in the network design based on the analytical results obtained. In particular, we discuss the AoI-energy tradeoff from different perspectives of source and relay nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With innovative applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ad hoc networks in various areas, their demands on broad bandwidth, large capacity and low latency become prominent. The combination of millimeter wave, directional antenna and time division multiple access techniques, which enables concurrent transmissions, is promising to deal with it. In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem in UAV ad hoc networks. Specifically, the slot assignment, antenna boresight and transmit power are jointly optimized to promote the network capacity. First, we formulate the optimization problem as the maximization of the fairness-weighted network capacity, subject to the constraint on priority guarantee. Then, because the formulated problem is a mixed integer non-linear programming problem (MINLP), which is NP-hard, two algorithms called dual-based iterative search algorithm (DISA) and sequential exhausted allocation algorithm (SEAA) are respectively proposed to efficiently solve it with acceptable complexity. DISA slacks the MINLP into a continuous-variable optimization problem and solves it with the Lagrangian dual method in an iterative manner. As a heuristic method, SEAA schedules links sequentially, i.e., from high-priority to low-priority ones. Numerical results demonstrate that both DISA and SEAA can efficiently allocate resources for UAVs, while guaranteeing the fairness and priority of links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate in the research and industry communities as to whether IEEE 802.11p or Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long-Term Evolution (LTE) should be used for vehicular communications. In this paper, we argue that a hybrid vehicular network combining both technologies can increase the performance of the system. We first propose a mechanism to improve location-based routing in a hybrid vehicular network architecture by data and signaling traffic separation on independent wireless networks. We then develop analytical models to calculate the stochastic upper bound of the end-to-end delay (E2ED) for location-based routing in three different networking architecture alternatives based on a) short-range ad hoc only, b) cellular only, and c) the proposed hybrid ad hoc/cellular network. The analytical approach in this paper is based on the stochastic network calculus (SNC) theory, which provides a solid and uniform framework for analysis of the upper bound of the E2ED in communication networks. It is demonstrated that the proposed hybrid network provides a lower E2ED compared with the other two alternatives. Comparisons of realistic simulation results, carried out in NS-3, and analytical results show that the proposed delay bounds provide relatively tight approximations for the E2ED in the three alternative architectures for vehicular networks investigated in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we mathematically characterize the improvement in device localizability achieved by allowing collaboration among devices. Depending on the detection sensitivity of the receivers in the devices, it is not unusual for a device to be localized to lack a sufficient number of detectable positioning signals from localized devices to determine its location without ambiguity (i.e., to be uniquely localizable). This occurrence is well-known to be a limiting factor in localization performance, especially in communications systems. In cellular positioning, e.g., cellular network designers call this the hearability problem. We study the conditions required for unique localizability and use tools from stochastic geometry to derive accurate analytic expressions for the probabilities of meeting these conditions in the noncollaborative and collaborative cases. We consider the scenario without shadowing, the scenario with shadowing and universal frequency reuse, and, finally, the shadowing scenario with random frequency reuse. The results from the latter scenario, which apply particularly to cellular networks, reveal that collaboration between two devices separated by only a short distance yields drastic improvements in both devices’ abilities to uniquely determine their positions. The results from this analysis are very promising and motivate delving further into techniques which enhance cellular positioning with small-scale collaborative ranging observations among nearby devices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces the mobile access coordinated wireless sensor network (MC-WSN)—a novel energy efficient scheme for time-sensitive applications. In conventional sensor networks with mobile access points (SENMA), the mobile access points (MAs) traverse the network to collect information directly from individual sensors. While simplifying the routing process, a major limitation with SENMA is that data transmission is limited by the physical speed of the MAs and their trajectory length, resulting in low throughput and large delay. In an effort to resolve this problem, we introduce the MC-WSN architecture, for which a major feature is that: through active network deployment and topology design, the number of hops from any sensor to the MA can be limited to a pre-specified number. In this paper, we investigate the optimal topology design that minimizes the average number of hops from sensor to MA, and provide the throughput analysis under both single-path and multipath routing cases. Moreover, putting MC-WSN in the bigger picture of network design and development, we provide a unified framework for wireless network modeling and characterization. Under this general framework, it can be seen that MC-WSN reflects the integration of structure-ensured reliability/efficiency and ad-hoc enabled flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of routing packets across a multi-hop network consisting of multiple sources of traffic and wireless links while ensuring bounded expected delay. Each packet transmission can be overheard by a random subset of receiver nodes among which the next relay is selected opportunistically. The main challenge in the design of minimum-delay routing policies is balancing the trade-off between routing the packets along the shortest paths to the destination and distributing the traffic according to the maximum backpressure. Combining important aspects of shortest path and backpressure routing, this paper provides a systematic development of a distributed opportunistic routing policy with congestion diversity (D-ORCD). D-ORCD uses a measure of draining time to opportunistically identify and route packets along the paths with an expected low overall congestion. D-ORCD with single destination is proved to ensure a bounded expected delay for all networks and under any admissible traffic, so long as the rate of computations is sufficiently fast relative to traffic statistics. Furthermore, this paper proposes a practical implementation of D-ORCD which empirically optimizes critical algorithm parameters and their effects on delay as well as protocol overhead. Realistic QualNet simulations for 802.11-based networks demonstrate a significant improvement in the average delay over comparable solutions in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports experimental results on self-organizing wireless networks carried by small flying robots. Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) composed of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are flexible, inexpensive, and fast to deploy. This makes them a very attractive technology for many civilian and military applications. Due to the high mobility of the nodes, maintaining a communication link between the UAVs is a challenging task. The topology of these networks is more dynamic than that of typical mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and of typical vehicle ad hoc networks. As a consequence, the existing routing protocols designed for MANETs partly fail in tracking network topology changes. In this paper, we compare two different routing algorithms for ad hoc networks: optimized link-state routing (OLSR) and predictive OLSR (P-OLSR). The latter is an OLSR extension that we designed for FANETs; it takes advantage of the Global Positioning System (GPS) information available on board. To the best of our knowledge, P-OLSR is currently the only FANET-specific routing technique that has an available Linux implementation. We present results obtained by both media-access-control (MAC) layer emulations and real-world experiments. In the experiments, we used a testbed composed of two autonomous fixed-wing UAVs and a node on the ground. Our experiments evaluate the link performance and the communication range, as well as the routing performance. Our emulation and experimental results show that P-OLSR significantly outperforms OLSR in routing in the presence of frequent network topology changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is the main concern and bottleneck for widely deployed wireless applications due to the fact that wireless channels are vulnerable to attacks and that wireless bandwidth is a constrained resource. In this sense, it is desirable to adaptively achieve security according to the available resource. In particular, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) based on cooperative communication (CC) present significant challenges to security issues, as well as issues of network performance and management. In this paper, we focus on authentication and topology control issues. Although authentication and topology control are separately studied in most existing works, they are, in fact, closely correlated in MANETs. For example, both authentication and topology control schemes have significant impacts on throughput. In this paper, we jointly consider authentication and topology control. Specifically, we analyze the effective throughput with upper layer authentication schemes and physical-layer schemes related to channel conditions and relay selections for CCs. A joint authentication and topology control (JATC) scheme is proposed to improve the throughput. JATC is formulated as a discrete stochastic optimization problem, which does not require prior perfect channel status but only channel estimate. We also mathematically prove the tracking convergence property and the convergence rate of the discrete stochastic optimization approach in this paper. Simulation results show that our scheme can substantially improve throughput in MANETs with CC. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent advances in wireless technologies have given rise to the emergence of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In such networks, the limited coverage of WiFi and the high mobility of the nodes generate frequent topology changes and network fragmentations. For these reasons, and taking into account that there is no central manager entity, routing packets through the network is a challenging task. Therefore, offering an efficient routing strategy is crucial to the deployment of VANETs. This paper deals with the optimal parameter setting of the optimized link state routing (OLSR), which is a well-known mobile ad hoc network routing protocol, by defining an optimization problem. This way, a series of representative metaheuristic algorithms (particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, genetic algorithm, and simulated annealing) are studied in this paper to find automatically optimal configurations of this routing protocol. In addition, a set of realistic VANET scenarios (based in the city of Málaga) have been defined to accurately evaluate the performance of the network under our automatic OLSR. In the experiments, our tuned OLSR configurations result in better quality of service (QoS) than the standard request for comments (RFC 3626), as well as several human experts, making it amenable for utilization in VANET configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Preventing the source-destination network flow information from being disclosed is pivotal for anonymous wireless network applications. However, the advance of network inference, which is able to obtain the flow information without directly measuring it, poses severe challenges towards this goal. Randomized routing is capable of hiding the flow information by injecting substantial errors to the network inference process. In this paper, we systematically study the behavior of randomized routing protocols, and categorize them into three templates, $k$ -random-relay, $k$ -random-neighbor and $k$ -random-path based on their routing behaviors. We propose technical models to characterize these templates in terms of their induced inference errors and their delay costs. We also use simulations to validate the theoretical results. Our work provides the first systematic study on understanding both the benefit and the cost of using randomized routing to hide the flow information in wireless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) communications are evolving as a potential and promising technology to address the ever increasing mobile data rate requirements. This paper addresses fair scheduling in directional antenna based mmWave wireless personal and local area networks with non-uniform traffic demand. Due to their small wavelength, mmWave signals are susceptible to blockage. The proposed fair schedulers handle the link blockage problem through relaying, and are capable of providing end-to-end fair bandwidth allocation to relay flows. To achieve differentiated and fair service allocation to various regions of the network while using only limited flow related information, a service tag based scheduler is proposed in this paper. Then, the performance bounds on the minimum throughput and unfairness of this scheduler are obtained. To approximate the performance of the service tag based scheduler while minimizing the control overhead, a heuristic fair scheduler is also proposed. Results from extensive simulations conducted in a mmWave WPAN deployed to support high data rate applications show the performance advantages of the proposed schedulers, compared to existing fair schedulers, in terms of throughput and fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A source coding problem in which a central source has to satisfy the demands of several receivers, with each receiver having some subset of the messages (side-information) held by the source is considered. The source has knowledge of only the cardinality of the side-information at each receiver. The encoding scheme used by the source to transmit at a higher throughput is referred to as an informed source code. A technique to obtain informed source codes by using $\ell $ -th Near Maximum Distance Separable (Near-MDS) Codes is presented. The advantage of using $\ell $ -th Near-MDS codes is the reduction in field size required. For certain informed source coding problems, the code obtained from $\ell $ -th Near-MDS codes is shown to be of the minimum length under certain field size restrictions. The same technique can be used for a given index coding problem to obtain index codes. The index codes obtained through this technique are optimal for, but not limited to, special cases of index coding problems discussed in the paper. Finding an optimal solution to a general index coding problem is NP hard and this technique helps in finding binary suboptimal solutions. Using the Gilbert-Varshamov bound, an upper bound on the lengths of optimal binary informed source codes is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]