Chapter 5 Ad Hoc Wireless

Network
Jang Ping Sheu

Introduction
Ad Hoc Network is a multi-hop relaying
network
ALOHAnet developed in 1970
Ethernet developed in 1980
In 1994, Bluetooth proposed by Ericsson to
develop a short-range, low-power, lowcomplexity, and inexpensive radio inteface
WLAN 802.11 spec. is proposed in 1997
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Cellular and Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Cellular Wireless Networks: infrastructure
dependent network
Ad Hoc Networks: multi-hop radio relaying
and without support of infrastructure
Wireless Mesh Networks
Wireless Sensor Networks

The major differences between cellular

networks and ad hoc networks as summarized
in Table 5.1
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Wireless Mesh
Networks
Cellular Wireless Networks

Hybrid Wireless
Networks

Infrastructure Dependent
(Single-Hop Wireless Networks)

Wireless Sensor
Networks

Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

(Multi-Hop Wireless Networks)

Figure 5.1. Cellular and ad hoc wireless networks.

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B
A
C

Switching Center
+
Gateway

Base Station
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Mobile Node

Figure 5.2. A cellular networks.

Path from C to E
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B
A
C

F
E

Mobile Node
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Wireless Link

Figure 5.3. An ad hoc wireless networks

Path from C to E
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Table 5.1 Differences between cellular networks and ad hoc

wireless networks
Cellular Networks

Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Fixed infrastructure-based

Infrastructure-less

Single-hop wireless links

Multi-hop wireless links

Guaranteed bandwidth
(designed for voice traffic)

Shared radio channel

(more suitable for best-effort data traffic)

Centralized routing

Distributed routing

Circuit-switched
(evolving toward packet switching)

Packet-switched
(evolving toward emulation of circuit
switching)

Seamless connectivity
(low call drops during handoffs)

Frequency path break

due to mobility

High cost and time of deployment

Quick and cost-effective deployment

Reuse of frequency spectrum through

geographical channel reuse

Dynamic frequency reuse based on carrier

sense mechanism

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Table 5.1 Differences between cellular networks and ad hoc

wireless networks (cont.)
Easier to achieve time synchronization

Time synchronization is difficult and

consumes bandwidth

Easier to employ bandwidth reservation

Bandwidth reservation requires complex

medium access control protocols

Application domains include mainly civilian

and commercial sector

Application domains include battlefields,

emergency search and rescue operation, and
collaborative computing

High cost of network maintenance

(backup power source, staffing, etc.)

Self-organization and maintenance properties

are built into the network

Mobile hosts are of relatively low complexity

Mobile hosts require more intelligence

(should have a transceiver as well as
routing/switching capacity)

Major goals of routing and call admission are

to maximize the call acceptance ratio and
minimize the call drop ratio

Man aim of routing is to find paths with

minimum overhead and also quick
reconfiguration of broken paths

Widely deployed and currently in the third

generation

Several issues are to be addressed for

successful commercial deployment even
though widespread use exists in defense

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Applications of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Military Applications
Establishing communication among a group of soldiers for
tactical operations
Coordination of military object moving at high speeds
such as fleets of airplanes or ships
Requirements: reliability, efficiency, secure communication,
and multicasting routing,

Collaborative and Distributed Computing

Conference, distributed files sharing

Emergency Operations
Search, rescue, crowd control, and commando operations
Support real-time and fault-tolerant communication paths
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Wireless Mesh Networks

An alternate communication infrastructure for
mobile or fixed nodes/users
Provides many alternate paths for a data
transfer session between a source and
destination
Advantages of Wireless Mesh Networks
High data rate, quick and low cost of deployment,
enhanced services, high scalability, easy
extendability, high availability, and low cost per bit
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Wired Network

Gateway node

Transmission range
A house with rooftop transceiver

Wired link to the Internet

Wireless link

Figure 5.4. Wireless mesh networks operating in a residential zone

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Internet

Radio relay node

Multi-hop radio relay link

Lamp

Wired link to the Internet

Coverage area

Figure 5.5 Wireless mesh network covering a highway

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Wireless Sensor Networks

A collection of a large number of sensor nodes
that are deployed in a particular region
Applications:
military, health care, home security, and
environmental monitoring

Differences with the ad hoc wireless networks:

Mobility of nodes, size of network, density of
deployment, power constraints, data/information
fusion, traffic distribution
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Hybrid Wireless Networks

HWN such as Multi-hop cellular networks and
integrated cellular ad hoc relay networks
The base station maintains the information about the
topology of the network for efficient routing
The capacity of a cellular network can be increased if the
network incorporates the properties of multi-hop relaying
along with the support of existing fixed infrastructure

Advantages:
Higher capacity than cellular networks due to better
channel reuse
Increased flexibility and reliability in routing
Better coverage and connectivity in holes
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B
A
C
D
E

Base Station

Switching Center
+
Gateway
Mobile Node

MCN communication

Figure 5.6. MCN architecture.

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Issues in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Medium access scheme

Routing, Multicasting, TPC protocol
Pricing scheme, QoS, Self-organization
Security, Energy management
Addressing and service discovery
Deployment considerations

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Medium Access Scheme

Distributed operation
fully distributed involving minimum control overhead

Synchronization
Mandatory for TDMA-based systems

Hidden terminals
Can significantly reduce the throughput of a MAC protocol

Exposed terminals
To improve the efficiency of the MAC protocol, the exposed
nodes should be allowed to transmit in a controlled fashion
without causing collision to the on-going data transfer

Access delay
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The Major Issues of MAC Scheme

Throughput and access delay
To minimize the occurrence of collision, maximize channel
utilization, and minimize controloverhead

Fairness
Equal share or weighted share of the bandwidth to all
competing nodes

Real-time traffic support

Resource reservation
Such as BW, buffer space, and processing power

Capability for power control

Adaptive rate control
Use of directional antennas
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The Major Challenge of Routing Protocol

Mobility result in frequent path break, packet
collision, and difficulty in resource reservation
Bandwidth constraint: BW is shared by every node
Error-prone and share channel: high bit error rate
Location-dependent contention: distributing the
network load uniformly across the network
Other resource constraint: computing power, battery
power, and buffer storage

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The Major Requirement of Routing Protocol

Minimum route acquisition delay

Quick route reconfiguration: to handle path breaks
Loop-free routing
Distributed routing approach
Minimum control overhead
Scalability
Provisioning of QoS:
supporting differentiated classes of services

Support for time-sensitive traffic

Security and privacy
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The Major Issues in Multicast Routing

Protocols
Robustness
recover and reconfigure quickly from link breaks

Efficiency
minimum number of transmissions to deliver a data packet
to all the group members

Minimal Control overhead

QoS support
Efficient group management
Scalability
Security

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Transport Layer Protocols

Objectives: setting up and maintaining
End-to-end connections, reliable end-to-end data
delivery, flow control, and congestion control

Major performance degradation:

Frequent path breaks, presence of old routing
information, high channel error rate, and frequent
network partitions

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Quality of Service Provisioning

QoS often requires negotiation between the host and
the network, resource reservation schemes, priority
scheduling and call admission control
QoS in Ad hoc wireless networks can be on a per
flow, per link, or per node
Qos Parameters: different applications have different
requirements
Multimedia: bandwidth and delay are the key parameters
Military: BW, delay, security and reliability
Emergency search and-rescue: availability is the key
parameters, multiple link disjoint paths
WSN: battery life, minimum energy consumption
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Quality of Service Provisioning

QoS-aware routing:
To have the routing use QoS parameters for finding a path
The parameters are network through put, packet delivery
ratio, reliability, delay, delay jitter, packet lost rate, bit error
rate, and path loss

QoS framework:
A frame work for QoS is a complete system that attempts
to provide the promised service
The QoS modules such as routing protocol, signaling
protocol, and resource management should react
promptly according to changes in the network state
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Self-Organization
An important property that an ad hoc wireless
network should exhibit is organizing and maintaining
the network by itself
Major activities: neighbor discovery, topology
organization, and topology reorganization
Ad hoc wireless networks should be able to perform
self-organization quickly and efficiently

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Security
The attack against ad hoc wireless networks are
classified into two types: passive and active attacks
Passive attack: malicious nodes to observe the
nature of activities and to obtain information in the
network without disrupting the operation
Active attack: disrupt the operation of the network
Internal attack: nodes belong to the same network
External attack: nodes outside the network

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Major Security Threats

Denial of service: either consume the network BW or
overloading the system
Resource consumption
Energy depletion: by directing unnecessary traffic through
nodes
Buffer overflow: filling unwanted data, routing table attack
(filling nonexistent destinations)

Host impersonation: A compromised node can act as

another node and respond control packets to create
wrong route entries and terminate the traffic
Information disclosure: support useful traffic pattern
Interference: create wide-spectrum noise
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Addressing and Service Discovery

An address that is globally unique is required for a
node to participate communication
Auto-configuration of address is required to allocate nonduplicate address to the nodes
In networks frequent partitioning and merging of network
components require duplicate address detection
mechanisms

Nodes in the network should be able to locate

services that other nodes provide

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Energy Management
Transmission power management:

RF hardware design ensure minimum power consumption

Uses variable power MAC protocol
Load balance in network layer
Reducing the number of retransmissions at the transport
layer
Application software developed for mobile computers

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Energy Management (cont.)

Battery energy management: extending the battery
life by taking chemical properties, discharge patterns,
and by the selection of a battery from a set of
batteries that is available for redundancy
Processor power management: CPU can be put into
different power saving modes during low processing
load conditions
Devices power management: can be done by OS by
selectively powering down interface devices that are
not used or by putting devices into different powersaving modes
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Scalability
The latency of path-finding involved with an
on-demand routing protocol in a large ad hoc
wireless network may be unacceptably high
A hierarchical topology-based system and
addressing may be more suitable for large ad
hoc wireless networks

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Deployment Considerations
The deployment of a commercial ad hoc wireless
network has the following benefits

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Low cost of deployment

Incremental deployment
Short deployment time
Re-configurability

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Major Issues for Deployment

Scenario of deployment
Military deployment
Data-centric (e.g. WSN)
User-centric (soldiers or vehicles carrying with wireless
communication devices)
Emergency operations deployment
Commercial wide-area deployment
Home network deployment

Required longevity of network: regenerative power

source can be deployed when the connectivityis
required for a longer duration of time
Area of coverage
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Major Issues for Deployment

Service availability: redundant nodes can be
deployed to against nodes failure
Operational integration with other infrastructure:
can be considered for improve the performance or
gathering additional information, or for providing
better QoS
Choice of protocols: the choices of protocols at
different layers of the protocol stack is to be done
taking into consideration the deployment scenario

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Ad Hoc Wireless in Internet

Similar to wireless internet, the ad hoc
wireless internet extends the service of the
Internet to the end user over an ad hoc
wireless network

Gateways: entry points to the wired Internet

Address mobility: similar to the Mobile IP
Routing: major problem in ad hoc wireless Internet
Transport layer protocol
Load balancing, pricing/billing, security, QoS
Service, address, and location discovery

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TCP/IP protocol stack

TCP/IP protocol stack

TCP/IP protocol stack

Application Layer
(HTTP, TELNET, SMTP,
etc.)

Application Layer
(HTTP, TELNET, SMTP,
etc.)

Application Layer
(HTTP, TELNET, SMTP,
etc.)

Transport Layer
(TCP/UDP)

Transport Layer
(TCP/UDP)

Transport Layer
(TCP/UDP)

Network Layer
(IPv4/IPv6)

Network Layer
(IPv4/IPv6)

802.11/HIPERLAN

802.11/HIPERLAN

Network Layer
(IPv4/IPv6)
802.11
HIPERLAN

802.3/802.4/80
2.5

Network Layer
(IPv4/IPv6)
802.3/802.4/802.5

Internet
Mobile node that
can be connected
to any AP running
ad hoc wireless
routing protocol

Mobile node that can relay

packets to any mobile node
running ad hoc wireless
routing protocol

Ad hoc wireless Internet

gateway connected to a
subnet of the Internet

Multi-hop wireless part of ad hoc wireless Internet

Traditional wired Internet

Flow of an IP packet from the wired Internet to a mobile node

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Transceiver antenna

Figure 5.7. A schematic diagram of the ad hoc wireless Internet

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Internet
A
Gateway Node

A house with rooftop transceiver

Transmission range

Path 1

Wired link to the Internet

Path 2

Wireless link

Figure 5.8. An illustration of the ad hoc wireless Internet implemented

by a wireless mesh network
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Home Work
4, 8, 11, 13

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