Distributed algorithmic studies in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

It has been envisioned that in the near future, wireless ad hoc networks would populate various application fields, ranging from disaster relief, environmental monitoring, surveillance, to medical applications, the observation of chemical and biological processes and community mesh networks. The decentralized and self-organizing nature of wireless ad hoc networks makes distributed algorithms fit very well in these networks, which however pose great challenges to the algorithm designers as they try to achieve optimal efficiency in communications. In this thesis, I develop a set of distributed algorithms addressing these challenges and solving some fundamental communication problems in wireless ad hoc networks.

Communications in wireless ad hoc networks happen on a shared medium, and consequently are subject to interference. The first part of the thesis focuses on disseminating information on multiple-access channels while avoiding collisions. For both single-channel and multi-channel networks, the complexity of information dissemination is investigated, and nearly optimal distributed algorithms are proposed.

The second part of the thesis focuses on designing efficient distributed algorithms for some fundamental problems under the physical Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) interference model. The SINR model defines global fading interference with which the success of a signal reception depends on all simultaneous transmissions. Compared with graph based models, the SINR model reflects the fading and cumulative nature of radio signals. Hence, the SINR model represents the physical reality more precisely. However, the global nature of the SINR model makes the analysis of distributed algorithms much more challenging. Two types of fundamental problems are addressed in this part. The first type is closely related to communication coordination, including the wireless link scheduling problem and the node coloring problem. The second type of problems are about basic communication primitives, including the local broadcasting problem and the multiple-message broadcast problem. I investigate the complexity of these fundamental problems under the SINR interference model, and present efficient or optimal distributed algorithms.

In the third part of the thesis, I propose a general interference model that can include commonly adopted interference models as special cases, and study whether efficient distributed algorithms can still be designed and analyzed in such a general model. Specifically, the affectance model is proposed in this part, which depicts the relative interference (affectance) on communication links caused by transmitting nodes. Both graph based models and the SINR model can be transformed into the affectance model. Under this general model, distributed algorithms with worst-case guarantees for the local broadcasting problem are presented. I also show how to make use of the developed techniques to get nearly optimal algorithms under the graph based model and the SINR model.