Wei Lou

Bio: Wei Lou is an academic researcher from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Wireless sensor network & Wireless network. The author has an hindex of 30, co-authored 97 publications receiving 3345 citations. Previous affiliations of Wei Lou include Nanjing University & Florida Atlantic University.

On reducing broadcast redundancy in ad hoc wireless networks

Abstract: Unlike in a wired network, a packet transmitted by a node in an ad hoc wireless network can reach all neighbors. Therefore, the total number of transmissions (forward nodes) is generally used as the cost criterion for broadcasting. The problem of finding the minimum number of forward nodes is NP-complete. Among various approximation approaches, dominant pruning (Lim and Kim 2001) utilizes 2-hop neighborhood information to reduce redundant transmissions. In this paper, we analyze some deficiencies of the dominant pruning algorithm and propose two better approximation algorithms: total dominant pruning and partial dominant pruning. Both algorithms utilize 2-hop neighborhood information more effectively to reduce redundant transmissions. Simulation results of applying these two algorithms show performance improvements compared with the original dominant pruning. In addition, two termination criteria are discussed and compared through simulation under both the static and dynamic environments.

On reducing broadcast redundancy in ad hoc wireless networks

Abstract: Unlike in a wired network, a packet transmitted by a node in an ad hoc wireless network can reach all neighbours. Therefore, the total number of transmissions (forward nodes) is generally used as the cost criterion for broadcasting. The problem of finding the minimum number of forward nodes is NP-complete. Among various approximation approaches, dominant pruning by H. Lim and C. Kim (2001) utilizes 2-hop neighbourhood information to reduce redundant transmissions. In this paper, we analyze some deficiencies of the dominant pruning algorithm and propose two better approximation algorithms: total dominant pruning and partial dominant pruning. Both algorithms utilize 2-hop neighbourhood information more effectively to reduce redundant transmissions. Simulation results of applying these two algorithms show performance improvements compared with the original dominant pruning. In addition, two termination criteria are discussed and compared through simulation.

Target-Oriented Scheduling in Directional Sensor Networks

Abstract: Unlike convectional omni-directional sensors that always have an omni-angle of sensing range, directional sensors may have a limited angle of sensing range due to technical constraints or cost considerations. A directional sensor network consists of a number of directional sensors, which can switch to several directions to extend their sensing ability to cover all the targets in a given area. Power conservation is still an important issue in such directional sensor networks. In this paper, we address the multiple directional cover sets problem (MDCS) of organizing the directions of sensors into a group of non-disjoint cover sets to extend the network lifetime. One cover set, in which the directions cover all the targets, is activated at one time. We prove the MDCS to be NP-complete and propose three heuristic algorithms for the MDCS. Simulation results are also presented to demonstrate the performance of these algorithms.

Energy-Efficient Wake-Up Scheduling for Data Collection and Aggregation

Abstract: A sensor in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) periodically produces data as it monitors its vicinity. The basic operation in such a network is the systematic gathering (with or without in-network aggregation) and transmitting of sensed data to a base station for further processing. A key challenging question in WSNs is to schedule nodes' activities to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we focus on designing energy-efficient protocols for low-data-rate WSNs, where sensors consume different energy in different radio states (transmitting, receiving, listening, sleeping, and being idle) and also consume energy for state transition. We use TDMA as the MAC layer protocol and schedule the sensor nodes with consecutive time slots at different radio states while reducing the number of state transitions. We prove that the energy consumption by our scheduling for homogeneous network is at most twice of the optimum and the timespan of our scheduling is at most a constant times of the optimum. The energy consumption by our scheduling for heterogeneous network is at most ? (log Rmax/Rmin) times of the optimum. We also propose effective algorithms to construct data gathering tree such that the energy consumption and the network throughput is within a constant factor of the optimum. Extensive simulation studies show that our algorithms do considerably reduce energy consumption.

Extended multipoint relays to determine connected dominating sets in MANETs

Abstract: Multipoint relays (MPR) provide a localized and optimized way of broadcasting messages in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Using partial 2-hop information, each node chooses a small set of forward neighbors to relay messages and this set covers the node's 2-hop neighbor set. These selected forward nodes form a connected dominating set (CDS) to ensure full coverage. Adjih et al. later proposed a novel extension of MPR to construct a small CDS and it is source-independent. In this paper, we provide several extensions to generate a smaller CDS using complete 2-hop information to cover each node's 2-hop neighbor set. We extend the notion of coverage in the original MPR. We prove that the extended MPR has a constant local approximation ratio compared with a logarithmic local ratio in the original MPR. In addition, we show that the extended MPR has a constant global probabilistic approximation ratio, while no such ratio exists in the original MPR and its existing extensions. The effectiveness of our approach is confirmed through a simulation study.

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

Abstract: A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

Vehicular Fog Computing: A Viewpoint of Vehicles as the Infrastructures

Abstract: With the emergence of ever-growing advanced vehicular applications, the challenges to meet the demands from both communication and computation are increasingly prominent. Without powerful communication and computational support, various vehicular applications and services will still stay in the concept phase and cannot be put into practice in the daily life. Thus, solving this problem is of great importance. The existing solutions, such as cellular networks, roadside units (RSUs), and mobile cloud computing, are far from perfect because they highly depend on and bear the cost of additional infrastructure deployment. Given tremendous number of vehicles in urban areas, putting these underutilized vehicular resources into use offers great opportunity and value. Therefore, we conceive the idea of utilizing vehicles as the infrastructures for communication and computation, named vehicular fog computing (VFC), which is an architecture that utilizes a collaborative multitude of end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out communication and computation, based on better utilization of individual communication and computational resources of each vehicle. By aggregating abundant resources of individual vehicles, the quality of services and applications can be enhanced greatly. In particular, by discussing four types of scenarios of moving and parked vehicles as the communication and computational infrastructures, we carry on a quantitative analysis of the capacities of VFC. We unveil an interesting relationship among the communication capability, connectivity, and mobility of vehicles, and we also find out the characteristics about the pattern of parking behavior, which benefits from the understanding of utilizing the vehicular resources. Finally, we discuss the challenges and open problems in implementing the proposed VFC system as the infrastructures. Our study provides insights for this novel promising paradigm, as well as research topics about vehicular information infrastructures.

Urban multi-hop broadcast protocol for inter-vehicle communication systems

Abstract: Inter-Vehicle Communication Systems rely on multi-hop broadcast to disseminate information to locations beyond the transmission range of individual nodes. Message dissemination is especially difficult in urban areas crowded with tall buildings because of the line-of-sight problem. In this paper, we propose a new efficient IEEE 802.11 based multi-hop broadcast protocol (UMB) which is designed to address the broadcast storm, hidden node, and reliability problems of multi-hop broadcast in urban areas. Thisprotocol assigns the duty of forwarding and acknowledging broadcast packet to only one vehicle by dividing the road portion inside the transmission range into segments and choosing the vehicle in the furthest non-empty segment without apriori topology information. When there is an intersection in the path of the message dissemination, new directional broadcasts are initiated by the repeaters located at the intersections. We have shown through simulations that our protocol has a very high success rate and efficient channel utilization when compared with other flooding based protocols.

An extended localized algorithm for connected dominating set formation in ad hoc wireless networks

Abstract: Efficient routing among a set of mobile hosts is one of the most important functions in ad hoc wireless networks. Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the search space for a route is reduced to the hosts in the set. A set is dominating if all the hosts in the system are either in the set or neighbors of hosts in the set. The efficiency of dominating-set-based routing mainly depends on the overhead introduced in the formation of the dominating set and the size of the dominating set. In this paper, we first review a localized formation of a connected dominating set called marking process and dominating-set-based routing. Then, we propose a dominant pruning rule to reduce the size of the dominating set. This dominant pruning rule (called Rule k) is a generalization of two existing rules (called Rule 1 and Rule 2, respectively). We prove that the vertex set derived by applying Rule k is still a connected dominating set. Rule k is more effective in reducing the dominating set derived from the marking process than the combination of Rules 1 and 2 and, surprisingly, in a restricted implementation with local neighborhood information, Rule k has the same communication complexity and less computation complexity. Simulation results confirm that Rule k outperforms Rules 1 and 2, especially in networks with relatively high vertex degree and high percentage of unidirectional links. We also prove that an upper bound exists on the average size of the dominating set derived from Rule k in its restricted implementation.

Coverage problems in sensor networks: A survey

Abstract: Sensor networks, which consist of sensor nodes each capable of sensing environment and transmitting data, have lots of applications in battlefield surveillance, environmental monitoring, industrial diagnostics, etc. Coverage which is one of the most important performance metrics for sensor networks reflects how well a sensor field is monitored. Individual sensor coverage models are dependent on the sensing functions of different types of sensors, while network-wide sensing coverage is a collective performance measure for geographically distributed sensor nodes. This article surveys research progress made to address various coverage problems in sensor networks. We first provide discussions on sensor coverage models and design issues. The coverage problems in sensor networks can be classified into three categories according to the subject to be covered. We state the basic coverage problems in each category, and review representative solution approaches in the literature. We also provide comments and discussions on some extensions and variants of these basic coverage problems.