NeTS-NECO: Minimizing Communication Latency with Multiple Channels And Radios in Multihop Wireless Networks

为多跳无线网络中的每个节点提供一个或多个多信道无线电设备为提高网络性能提供了一个有前途的途径。最近，多个信道和无线电对网络吞吐量的影响已被广泛研究。但人们对它们对通信延迟的影响知之甚少，而通信延迟是紧急响应和灾难恢复等广泛的时间关键型应用程序的重要性能指标。虽然毫无疑问，多通道和无线电具有减少通信延迟的潜力，但真正重要的是特定算法可以实现多少好处。本研究进行全面的算法研究，最大限度地减少通信延迟，利用多个信道和无线电。在这项研究中开发的算法可以直接应用到支持实时应用在多跳无线网络。对信道数和/或无线电台数的性能的理论分析也可以提供指导的多跳无线网络的成本效益的设计的行业。本研究的重点是四个基本的通信任务，涉及到几乎所有的应用程序的通信调度：广播，聚合，收集，和信标。为这四个任务中的每一个任务寻求最短通信时间表的问题是NP难的。研究人员为它们开发了常数近似算法，并分析了信道数量和无线电数量对构建的通信时间表的延迟的影响。这项研究是感兴趣的一些研究社区，并可能作为一个有趣的未来项目的基础上，多信道多无线电多跳无线网络。学生培训和课程开发都融入了这项研究。

Providing each node in a multihop wireless network with one or more multi-channel radios offers a promising avenue for improving the networking performance. Recently, the impact of multiple channels and radios on network throughput has been extensively studied. But little is known about their impact on communication latency, which is an important performance metric for a broad class of time-critical applications such as emergency response and disaster recovery. While it is of no doubt that multiple channels and radios hold potentials of reducing the communication latency, what really matters is how much benefit can be realized by specific algorithms. This research conducts comprehensive algorithmic studies of minimizing the communication latency by utilizing multiple channels and radios. The algorithms developed in this research can be applied directly to support real-time applications in multihop wireless networks. The theoretical analysis of the performance against the number of channels and/or the number of radios can also provide guidance to industries on cost-effective design of multihop wireless networks.This research focuses on the communication schedules for four primitive communication tasks which are involved in almost allapplications: broadcasting, aggregation, gathering, and beaconing. The problem of seeking a shortest communication schedule for each of these four tasks is NP-hard. The investigators develop constant-approximation algorithms for them and analyze the impact of the number of channels and the number of radios on the latencies of the constructed communication schedules. This research is of interest to a number of research communities, and may serve as a basis for interesting future projects on multi-channel multi-radio multihop wireless networks. Both student training and curriculum development are integrated into this research.