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Special section on wireless network behaviour and design
Computer Communications 35 (2012) 2173–2174
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Computer Communications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom
Editorial
Special section on wireless network behaviour and design Wireless networking is emerging as one of the most common modes of building a variety of network infrastructure, and yet it is evident that current understanding of even the most basic primitives of wireless networking architectures and systems design remain largely unknown. There are many reasons for this including the very nature of the unguided channel and interactions in the complex cyber-physical system, both at the physical layer as well as complex behaviours of the end users and devices. Usage patterns follow social interaction laws and constraints and machineto-machine communication in such specialised environments as sensor networks create behaviours not before seen in the fixed networks and much of the acquired common wisdom has been overturned. In this new world, research becomes perhaps even more important than ever before, in order to bring order to the increased complexity of the systems and to provide the basic understanding to be able to properly engineer wireless networks to meet performance demands and predictable behaviour. This issue of Computer Communications presents papers covering a variety of aspects of wireless networks and shed new light on their performance and behaviour. We present a collection of strong contributions, extended archival versions of shorter papers originally presented in the 14th ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM). The papers represent recent advances in wireless network modeling in a variety of problem areas, which highlight the breadth of the problem space in the field. The first paper of the issue, ‘‘Minimum Latency Data Aggregation in the Physical Interference Model’’ by Dung T. Huynh et al., presents the first results on low latency data aggregation based on SINR, which yields a much more complex model than previous results which have been based on more simplistic graph based models. The resulting work opens up for further more realistic and therefore more accurate modelling of this problem area. After the authors present their theoretic study of the problem, they move onto presenting results from a simulation study to investigate the performance of their proposed algorithms. The second paper ‘‘Exploiting Limited Density Information Towards Near-Optimal Energy Balanced Data Propagation’’ by Dionysios Efstathiou et al. presents a method for managing traffic propagation in wireless sensor networks. The method aims to maximise the life span of the network by maximising a subset of critical nodes’ lifespan through balancing of dissemination paths. Even though the idea has been proposed before, the authors break new ground and thoroughly compare their solution with existing literature, finding that the new approach outperforms previous
0140-3664/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2012.08.022
approaches both in terms of network lifespan as well as energy balancing properties. The authors also compare their approach with an ideal centralised solution and find that the achievable performance is close to ideal. The third paper, ‘‘Ego network models for Future Internet social networking environments’’ by Passarella et al., presents work on modeling of social relationships. In many wireless settings it is important to understand the relationship between the users so that traffic can be generated accordingly, both in terms of volume, arrival distribution and mobility. Social interactions are becoming one of the basic causes of data generation and being able to generate appropriate corresponding traffic is necessary in order to investigate the performance of wireless systems. The paper presents a set of algorithms for generating synthetic EGO-networks, a very common representation of human social interaction networks. The algorithms are validated through experimental studies and found to conform well with existing data sets of real human networks. These works are followed by two papers that attack problems from the cellular world. The first paper, ‘‘A Performance Evaluation Tool for Spectrum Sharing in Multi-Operator LTE Networks’’ by Luca Anchora et al. presents a set of extensions to the NS-3 simulator to enable experimentation of resource sharing strategies in LTE networks. Multi-operator resource sharing schemes are inherently complex, involving many complex layers in different states and in concurrency. The difficulty in modeling this environment mathematically is therefore inherently large and such modelling is also time consuming. The extensions presented by the authors allow simulations to be carried out to gain important insights into the general nature of solutions in this space and help researchers narrowing down the search space for efficient methods. The framework is tested and validated. The second paper addresses a well-known problem from the cellular world in effective management of location information. In cellular networks, the location of terminals is maintained with the use of location updates from terminals and paging messages from the network in order to locate a terminal among several cells. In many cases, this control signalling can become a strain on the network and lead to congestion of control messages. This paper presents an optimisation strategy for solving this problem using tracking area lists which are part of the LTE standards family. The proposed elegant solution manages to significantly improve on existing methods without the requirement of additional information to what is already readily available in LTE networks. We hope you will enjoy this compilation of research results on performance modelling and experimentation of wireless networks.
2174
Editorial / Computer Communications 35 (2012) 2173–2174
Guest editors Bjorn Landfeldt Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden E-mail address: [email protected] Luciano Bononi Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 4 September 2012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Computer Communications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom
Editorial
Special section on wireless network behaviour and design Wireless networking is emerging as one of the most common modes of building a variety of network infrastructure, and yet it is evident that current understanding of even the most basic primitives of wireless networking architectures and systems design remain largely unknown. There are many reasons for this including the very nature of the unguided channel and interactions in the complex cyber-physical system, both at the physical layer as well as complex behaviours of the end users and devices. Usage patterns follow social interaction laws and constraints and machineto-machine communication in such specialised environments as sensor networks create behaviours not before seen in the fixed networks and much of the acquired common wisdom has been overturned. In this new world, research becomes perhaps even more important than ever before, in order to bring order to the increased complexity of the systems and to provide the basic understanding to be able to properly engineer wireless networks to meet performance demands and predictable behaviour. This issue of Computer Communications presents papers covering a variety of aspects of wireless networks and shed new light on their performance and behaviour. We present a collection of strong contributions, extended archival versions of shorter papers originally presented in the 14th ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM). The papers represent recent advances in wireless network modeling in a variety of problem areas, which highlight the breadth of the problem space in the field. The first paper of the issue, ‘‘Minimum Latency Data Aggregation in the Physical Interference Model’’ by Dung T. Huynh et al., presents the first results on low latency data aggregation based on SINR, which yields a much more complex model than previous results which have been based on more simplistic graph based models. The resulting work opens up for further more realistic and therefore more accurate modelling of this problem area. After the authors present their theoretic study of the problem, they move onto presenting results from a simulation study to investigate the performance of their proposed algorithms. The second paper ‘‘Exploiting Limited Density Information Towards Near-Optimal Energy Balanced Data Propagation’’ by Dionysios Efstathiou et al. presents a method for managing traffic propagation in wireless sensor networks. The method aims to maximise the life span of the network by maximising a subset of critical nodes’ lifespan through balancing of dissemination paths. Even though the idea has been proposed before, the authors break new ground and thoroughly compare their solution with existing literature, finding that the new approach outperforms previous
0140-3664/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2012.08.022
approaches both in terms of network lifespan as well as energy balancing properties. The authors also compare their approach with an ideal centralised solution and find that the achievable performance is close to ideal. The third paper, ‘‘Ego network models for Future Internet social networking environments’’ by Passarella et al., presents work on modeling of social relationships. In many wireless settings it is important to understand the relationship between the users so that traffic can be generated accordingly, both in terms of volume, arrival distribution and mobility. Social interactions are becoming one of the basic causes of data generation and being able to generate appropriate corresponding traffic is necessary in order to investigate the performance of wireless systems. The paper presents a set of algorithms for generating synthetic EGO-networks, a very common representation of human social interaction networks. The algorithms are validated through experimental studies and found to conform well with existing data sets of real human networks. These works are followed by two papers that attack problems from the cellular world. The first paper, ‘‘A Performance Evaluation Tool for Spectrum Sharing in Multi-Operator LTE Networks’’ by Luca Anchora et al. presents a set of extensions to the NS-3 simulator to enable experimentation of resource sharing strategies in LTE networks. Multi-operator resource sharing schemes are inherently complex, involving many complex layers in different states and in concurrency. The difficulty in modeling this environment mathematically is therefore inherently large and such modelling is also time consuming. The extensions presented by the authors allow simulations to be carried out to gain important insights into the general nature of solutions in this space and help researchers narrowing down the search space for efficient methods. The framework is tested and validated. The second paper addresses a well-known problem from the cellular world in effective management of location information. In cellular networks, the location of terminals is maintained with the use of location updates from terminals and paging messages from the network in order to locate a terminal among several cells. In many cases, this control signalling can become a strain on the network and lead to congestion of control messages. This paper presents an optimisation strategy for solving this problem using tracking area lists which are part of the LTE standards family. The proposed elegant solution manages to significantly improve on existing methods without the requirement of additional information to what is already readily available in LTE networks. We hope you will enjoy this compilation of research results on performance modelling and experimentation of wireless networks.
2174
Editorial / Computer Communications 35 (2012) 2173–2174
Guest editors Bjorn Landfeldt Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden E-mail address: [email protected] Luciano Bononi Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 4 September 2012