The Theory of Stochastic Processes. By D. R. Cox and H. D. Miller. Pp. x, 398. 70s. (Methuen)

Future generation cellular networks are expected to provide ubiquitous broadband access to a continuously growing number of mobile users. In this context, LTE systems represent an important milestone towards the so called 4G cellular networks. A key feature of LTE is the adoption of advanced Radio Resource Management procedures in order to increase the system performance up to the Shannon limit. Packet scheduling mechanisms, in particular, play a fundamental role, because they are responsible for choosing, with fine time and frequency resolutions, how to distribute radio resources among different stations, taking into account channel condition and QoS requirements. This goal should be accomplished by providing, at the same time, an optimal trade-off between spectral efficiency and fairness. In this context, this paper provides an overview on the key issues that arise in the design of a resource allocation algorithm for LTE networks. It is intended for a wide range of readers as it covers the topic from basics to advanced aspects. The downlink channel under frequency division duplex configuration is considered as object of our study, but most of the considerations are valid for other configurations as well. Moreover, a survey on the most recent techniques is reported, including a classification of the different approaches presented in literature. Performance comparisons of the most well-known schemes, with particular focus on QoS provisioning capabilities, are also provided for complementing the described concepts. Thus, this survey would be useful for readers interested in learning the basic concepts before going into the details of a particular scheduling strategy, as well as for researchers aiming at deepening more specific aspects.

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Downlink Packet Scheduling in LTE Cellular Networks: Key Design Issues and a Survey

Appearing in 1st IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Net Protocols and Applications (SNPA). Anchorage, Alaska, USA. May 11, 2003. RMST: Reliable Data Transport in Sensor Networks Fred Stann, John Heidemann Abstract – Reliable data transport in wireless sensor networks is a multifaceted problem influenced by the physical, MAC, network, and transport layers. Because sensor networks are subject to strict resource constraints and are deployed by single organizations, they encourage revisiting traditional layering and are less bound by standardized placement of services such as reliability. This paper presents analysis and experiments resulting in specific recommendations for implementing reliable data transport in sensor nets. To explore reliability at the transport layer, we present RMST (Reliable Multi- Segment Transport), a new transport layer for Directed Diffusion. RMST provides guaranteed delivery and fragmentation/reassembly for applications that require them. RMST is a selective NACK-based protocol that can be configured for in-network caching and repair. Second, these energy constraints, plus relatively low wireless bandwidths, make in-network processing both feasible and desirable [3]. Third, because nodes in sensor networks are usually collaborating towards a common task, rather than representing independent users, optimization of the shared network focuses on throughput rather than fairness. Finally, because sensor networks are often deployed by a single organization with inexpensive hardware, there is less need for interoperability with existing standards. For all of these reasons, sensor networks provide an environment that encourages rethinking the structure of traditional communications protocols. The main contribution is an evaluation of the placement of reliability for data transport at different levels of the protocol stack. We consider implementing reliability in the MAC, transport layer, application, and combinations of these. We conclude that reliability is important at the MAC layer and the transport layer. MAC-level reliability is important not just to provide hop-by-hop error recovery for the transport layer, but also because it is needed for route discovery and maintenance. (This conclusion differs from previous studies in reliability for sensor nets that did not simulate routing. [4]) Second, we have developed RMST (Reliable Multi-Segment Transport), a new transport layer, in order to understand the role of in- network processing for reliable data transfer. RMST benefits from diffusion routing, adding minimal additional control traffic. RMST guarantees delivery, even when multiple hops exhibit very high error rates. 1 Introduction Wireless sensor networks provide an economical, fully distributed, sensing and computing solution for environments where conventional networks are impractical. This paper explores the design decisions related to providing reliable data transport in sensor nets. The reliable data transport problem in sensor nets is multi-faceted. The emphasis on energy conservation in sensor nets implies that poor paths should not be artificially bolstered via mechanisms such as MAC layer ARQ during route discovery and path selection [1]. Path maintenance, on the other hand, benefits from well- engineered recovery either at the MAC layer or the transport layer, or both. Recovery should not be costly however, since many applications in sensor nets are impervious to occasional packet loss, relying on the regular delivery of coarse-grained event descriptions. Other applications require loss detection and repair. These aspects of reliable data transport include the provision of guaranteed delivery and fragmentation/ reassembly of data entities larger than the network MTU. Sensor networks have different constraints than traditional wired nets. First, energy constraints are paramount in sensor networks since nodes can often not be recharged, so any wasted energy shortens their useful lifetime [2]. This work was supported by DARPA under grant DABT63-99-1-0011 as part of the SCAADS project, and was also made possible in part due to support from Intel Corporation and Xerox Corporation. Fred Stann and John Heidemann are with USC/Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, CA, USA E-mail: fstann@usc.edu, johnh@isi.edu. 2 Architectural Choices There are a number of key areas to consider when engineering reliability for sensor nets. Many current sensor networks exhibit high loss rates compared to wired networks (2% to 30% to immediate neighbors)[1,5,6]. While error detection and correction at the physical layer are important, approaches at the MAC layer and higher adapt well to the very wide range of loss rates seen in sensor networks and are the focus of this paper. MAC layer protocols can ameliorate PHY layer unreliability, and transport layers can guarantee delivery. An important question for this paper is the trade off between implementation of reliability at the MAC layer (i.e. hop to hop) vs. the Transport layer, which has traditionally been concerned with end-to-end reliability. Because sensor net applications are distributed, we also considered implementing reliability at the application layer. Our goal is to minimize the cost of repair in terms of transmission.

RMST: Reliable Data Transport in Sensor Networks

At some point in the future, how far out we do not exactly know, wireless access to the Internet will outstrip all other forms of access bringing the freedom of mobility to the way we access the we...

ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review

The performance of mobile computing would be significantly improved by leveraging cloud computing and migrating mobile workloads for remote execution at the cloud. In this paper, to efficiently handle the peak load and satisfy the requirements of remote program execution, we propose to deploy cloud servers at the network edge and design the edge cloud as a tree hierarchy of geo-distributed servers, so as to efficiently utilize the cloud resources to serve the peak loads from mobile users. The hierarchical architecture of edge cloud enables aggregation of the peak loads across different tiers of cloud servers to maximize the amount of mobile workloads being served. To ensure efficient utilization of cloud resources, we further propose a workload placement algorithm that decides which edge cloud servers mobile programs are placed on and how much computational capacity is provisioned to execute each program. The performance of our proposed hierarchical edge cloud architecture on serving mobile workloads is evaluated by formal analysis, small-scale system experimentation, and large-scale trace-based simulations.

A hierarchical edge cloud architecture for mobile computing

Energy is an extremely critical resource for battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSN), thus making energy-efficient protocol design a key challenging problem. Most of the existing energy-efficient routing protocols always forward packets along the minimum energy path to the sink to merely minimize energy consumption, which causes an unbalanced distribution of residual energy among sensor nodes, and eventually results in a network partition. In this paper, with the help of the concept of potential in physics, we design an Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol (EBRP) by constructing a mixed virtual potential field in terms of depth, energy density, and residual energy. The goal of this basic approach is to force packets to move toward the sink through the dense energy area so as to protect the nodes with relatively low residual energy. To address the routing loop problem emerging in this basic algorithm, enhanced mechanisms are proposed to detect and eliminate loops. The basic algorithm and loop elimination mechanism are first validated through extensive simulation experiments. Finally, the integrated performance of the full potential-based energy-balanced routing algorithm is evaluated through numerous simulations in a random deployed network running event-driven applications, the impact of the parameters on the performance is examined and guidelines for parameter settings are summarized. Our experimental results show that there are significant improvements in energy balance, network lifetime, coverage ratio, and throughput as compared to the commonly used energy-efficient routing algorithm.

EBRP: Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

The congestion problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is quite different from that in traditional networks. Most current congestion control algorithms try to alleviate the congestion by reducing the rate at which the source nodes inject packets into the network. However, this traffic control scheme always decreases the throughput so as to violate fidelity level required by the applications. In this paper, we present a solution that sufficiently exerts the idle or underloaded nodes to alleviate congestion and improve the overall throughput in WSNs. To achieve this goal, a traffic-aware dynamic routing (TADR) algorithm is proposed to route packets around the congestion areas and scatter the excessive packets along multiple paths consisting of idle and underloaded nodes. Utilizing the concept of potential in classical physics, our TADR algorithm is designed through constructing a hybrid virtual potential field using depth and normalized queue length to force the packets to steer clear of obstacles created by congestion and eventually move toward the sink. The simulation results show that the proposed solution improves the overall throughput by around 370 percent as compared to MintRoute, which is one of benchmark routing protocols. Furthermore, TADR scheme has low overhead suitable for large-scale, dense sensor networks.

Traffic-Aware Dynamic Routing to Alleviate Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks

An increasing number of TCP performance issues including TCP Incast, TCP Outcast, and long query completion times are common in large-scale data centers. We demonstrate that the root cause of these problems is that existing techniques are unable to maintain self-clocking or to achieve accurate and rapid packet loss notification. We present cutting payload (CP), a mechanism that simply drops a packet's payload at an overloaded switch, and a SACK-like precise ACK (PACK) mechanism to accurately inform senders about lost packets. Experiments demonstrate that CP successfully addresses the root cause of TCP performance issues. Furthermore, CP works well with other TCP variants used in data center networks.

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Catch the whole lot in an action: rapid precise packet loss notification in data centers

Recently, TCP incast problem attracts increasing attention since the receiver suffers drastic goodput drop when it simultaneously strips data over multiple servers. Lots of attempts have been made to address the problem through experiments and simulations. However, to the best of our knowledge, few solutions can solve it fundamentally at low cost. In this paper, a goodput model of TCP incast is built to understand why goodput collapse occurs. We conclude that TCP incast goodput deterioration is mainly caused by two types of timeouts, one happens at the tail of a data block and dominates the goodput when the number of senders is small, while the other one at the head of a data block and governs the goodput when the number of senders is large. The proposed model describes the causes of these two types of timeouts which are related to the incast communication pattern, block size, bottleneck buffer and so on. We validate the proposed model by comparing with simulation data, finding that it can well characterize the features of TCP incast. We also discuss the impact of most parameters on the goodput of TCP incast.

Modeling and understanding TCP incast in data center networks

Time synchronization is one of the most fundamental services for numerous wireless sensor network applications. In this article the definition and basic concepts of time synchronization are introduced, and the related work is summarized in brief. Through analyzing the characteristics of the existing typical synchronization protocols and making a comprehensive comparison of the performance of various algorithms, we present a common guideline for designing the time synchronization protocol in WSN. Following this guideline, we develop a new time synchronization protocol called Self-Correcting Time Synchronization (SCTS), which converts the time synchronization problem into an online dynamic self-adjusting optimizing process to make the offset compensation and drift compensation simultaneously. The time and space complexities of the algorithm implementation are very low. In addition, the SCTS protocol fully exploits the inherent broadcast property of wireless channel, so the communication overhead is rather low. Because the algorithm implementation is based on the phase locked loop principle, an equivalent digital PLL without an actual voltage controlled oscillator is also proposed to avoid introducing the extra hardware required by a traditional PLL circuit. Finally, we validate SCTS on the Berkeley Mica2 experimental platform, and the performance is evaluated and compared to the existing typical time synchronization protocol.

Fengyuan Ren

Papers

EBRP: Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Traffic-Aware Dynamic Routing to Alleviate Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks

Catch the whole lot in an action: rapid precise packet loss notification in data centers

Modeling and understanding TCP incast in data center networks

Self-correcting time synchronization using reference broadcast in wireless sensor network