Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 30, Issue 10, 31 July 2007, Pages 2225-2235
Computer Communications

A fast and efficient multicast algorithm for QoS group communications in heterogeneous network

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2007.05.004Get rights and content

Abstract

With the development of MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks), more and more mobile nodes need to access the Internet. To benefit the integration of MANETs and the Internet, a new heterogeneous network architecture has been proposed, which consists of several MANETs (e.g., working teams) attached to the backbone Internet through different gateway nodes. In such a heterogeneous network, group communications occur when several team leaders need to work in a cooperative way. Furthermore, strict QoS requirements on delay and delay variation are required for some time-sensitive applications. In wireline network, such a problem is defined as DVBMT (Delay- and delay Variation-Bounded Multicast Tree) problem [N.R. George, B. Ilia, Multicast routing with end-to-end delay and delay variation constraints, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 15 (3) (1997) 346–356] and proved to be NP-complete. To solve the DVBMT problem in the heterogeneous network, we propose a fast and efficient multicast algorithm. It takes the wireless routing delay into account and can construct a low delay variation multicast tree spanning all the gateway nodes involved in the group communications. It improves an existing algorithm called DDVCA (Delay and Delay Variation Constraint Algorithm) [P.-R. Sheu, S.-T. Chen, A fast and efficient heuristic algorithm for the delay- and delay variation-bounded multicast tree problem, Computer Communications 25 (8) (2002) 825–833], which is known to be the best for the DVBMT problem. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first one which really outperforms DDVCA. Theoretical analysis has explained the drawbacks of both DDVCA and an improvement algorithm previously proposed in Kim et al. [M.S. Kim, Y.-C. Bang, H.S. Choo, On core selection algorithm for reducing delay variation of many-to-many multicasts with delay-bounds, in: Proc. IFIP Networking (2004)]. In addition, theoretical proof on the performance improvement of our algorithm over DDVCA is provided. Experimental results also show that the proposed algorithm outperforms DDVCA in terms of multicast delay variation with the same time complexity as DDVCA.

Introduction

MANET is a self-organizing wireless local area network without infrastructure and central administration. It has the advantages of low cost, plug-and-play convenience, and flexibility. The application field of MANETs has enjoyed dramatic increase in popularity over the last decade. Although they were designed and developed for military environments, they are also currently used in various civilian applications such as conferencing, emergency services, home networking, personal area networks and bluetooth, embedded computing applications, and so on.

Providing Internet access capability for MHs (mobile hosts) in the MANET is necessary for pursuing the dream of broadband wireless Internet access. Extensive work has been done on extending IP connectivity of the MANETs. MIPMANET [4] is a solution for connecting an MANET, in which on-demand routing is used, to the Internet. MIPMANET provides Internet access by using Mobile IP with foreign agent care-of addresses and reverse tunnelling. Åhlund et al. [5] proposed and described an integrated connectivity solution and its prototype connecting IP networks and MANETs running the reactive AODV routing protocol, where Mobile IP is used for mobility management. Ratanchandani et al. [6] examined the use of Mobile IP in order to provide global Internet connectivity to MANETs that use an on-demand routing protocol. It presents a hybrid approach that combines the advantage of proactive approaches that rely on the flooding of agent advertisements and reactive approaches that rely completely on the reactive mechanisms of on-demand routing to obtain connectivity. Tseng et al. [7] proposed a heterogeneous network architecture, which consists of multiple MANETs attached to the backbone Internet. This type of architecture extends the typical wireless access points to multiple MANETs, each as a subnet of the Internet, to create an integrated environment that supports both macro and micro IP mobility. The heterogeneous network architecture will facilitate the current trend of moving to an all-IP wireless environment. Fig. 1 shows a heterogeneous network with three MANETs attached to the Internet.

In the heterogeneous network, gateway is a fixed node connecting an MANET to the Internet and each gateway serves only one MANET. Gateways forward data packets and relay them between MANETs and the Internet. When an MANET is connected to the Internet, it is important for the MHs to detect available gateways providing access to the Internet. Therefore, a gateway discovery mechanism is required. Lots of efforts have been devoted to the problem of Internet gateway discovery and gateway forwarding strategies [8], [9], [10]. These works have provided the foundation for the practical implementation of our algorithm.

An MANET can be seen as a team working in a geographical region. In the heterogeneous network, collaborative and distributed mobile computing may occur when several MANETs distributed in different areas are involved in group communications. Due to the limitation of radio transmission range of MHs, inter-MANET information transmission needs to go through the Internet. Based on the application requirement, some teams need to coordinate their work, hence involve one-to-many or multicast communication patterns. Each team will elect a team leader, which is responsible for information transmission between mobile nodes and Internet gateway. So there is a two-tier communication architecture: the lower tier is the communication between team leader and team members in the same team, the higher tier is the communication among team leaders and Internet gateways. The AODV routing protocol is used to discover routes between team leader and the gateway.

QoS is an important issue for multicast communication. End-to-end delay is an important QoS parameter in data communications to guarantee that the messages transmitted by the source can reach the destination(s) within a certain amount of time. Multicast delay variation is defined as the difference between the maximum and the minimum multicast end-to-end delays on the multicast tree.

Without loss of generality, we assume a group communication scenario in the heterogeneous network: one team leader is the source and wants to multicast messages to several other team leaders called destinations. The source will transmit the messages to its Internet gateway called the source gateway using AODV protocol. Then the source gateway will transmit the messages to all the destination gateways using a multicast tree in the backbone Internet. Finally, each destination gateway will forward the messages to the destination in its MANET also using AODV protocol, separately.

To support such QoS group communication scenarios in the heterogeneous network, efficient QoS multicast algorithm needs to be developed. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient QoS mobile multicast algorithm, which can find a multicast tree achieving smaller multicast delay variation under the multicast end-to-end delay constraint. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) apply the algorithm to the heterogeneous network and construct a wireline backbone multicast tree which can satisfy the QoS requirements of the multicast communications among mobile nodes distributed in different MANETs; (2) achieve better performance in terms of multicast delay variation than DDVCA, which is known to be the best.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the network model, the problem specification, related work. In Section 3, we firstly discuss the drawbacks of both DDVCA and one previously proposed improvement algorithm to DDVCA, and then present the proposed fast and efficient multicast algorithm with theoretical analysis. Performance evaluation is conducted in Section 4. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 5.

Section snippets

Network model and problem specification

The backbone network can be modeled as a weighted digraph G(V, E), where V represents the set of nodes including gateways, and E represents the set of links between the nodes. For each link l  E, a link-delay function D: l  r+ is defined. A nonnegative value D(l) represents the transmission delay on link l.

A multicast message is sent from the source team leader. It is first forwarded to the source gateway vs  V, then arrives at a set of destination gateways M  V  {vs} through a multicast tree, and

A fast and efficient multicast algorithm

Although DDVCA shows good performance, drawbacks have been pointed out [2], which have motivated our research. We propose a fast and efficient multicast algorithm to construct a multicast tree with small multicast delay variation under the multicast end-to-end delay constraint. Both DDVCA and the proposed algorithm will check all the network nodes and select one of them as the central node. The difference between them is in the central node selection method. DDVCA will select the one whose SPT

Performance evaluation

In Section 3.1, we have described the drawbacks of both DDVCA and one previously proposed improvement algorithm. We point out that the improvement algorithm does not work. In Section 3.4, an example is given to show that our algorithm really improves and outperforms DDVCA. To verify the performance of our algorithm, simulation experiments have been conducted. We generate the connected network topology with n nodes and m links (n  1  m  n(n  1)/2). The degree of each node does not exceed d. The

Conclusions and future works

In this paper, we have investigated the DVBMT problem in the heterogeneous network with several MANETs attached to a backbone wireline network. We have proved that it is still NP-hard problem. Several algorithms have been proposed to solve the DVBMT problem. DVMA and DDVCA are two promising ones. DDVCA outperforms DVMA with lower time complexity and slight improvement on the multicast delay variation. DDVCA is known to the best algorithm for the DVBMT problem. However, DDVCA has inherent

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the University Grant Council of Hong Kong under the CERG grant PolyU 5170/03E, by the National High-Tech Research and Development Plan of China under Grant No. 2006AA01Z214; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60673159; Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University.

Hui Cheng received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Northeastern University, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D degree in the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.

His research interests include multicast routing and QoS mobile group communication.

References (17)

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Hui Cheng received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Northeastern University, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D degree in the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.

His research interests include multicast routing and QoS mobile group communication.

Prof. Jiannong Cao received the B.Sc. degree in computer science from Nanjing University, Nanjing, China in 1982, and the M.Sc. and the Ph.D degrees in computer science from Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, in 1986 and 1990, respectively.

He is currently a professor in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong. He is also the director of the Internet and Mobile Computing Lab in the department. He was on the faculty of computer science at James Cook University and University of Adelaide in Australia, and City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, networking, mobile computing, fault tolerance, and distributed software architecture and tools. He has published over 160 technical papers in the above areas.

Prof. Cao is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Communication Society, IEEE, and ACM. He is also a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing, IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing, IEEE Technical Committee on Fault Tolerant Computing, and Technical Committee on Computer Architecture of the China Computer Federation. He has served as a member of editorial boards of several international journals, a reviewer for international journals and conference proceedings, and also as an organizing/program committee member for many international conferences.

Prof. Xingwei Wang received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D degrees in computer science from Northeastern University, China, in 1989, 1992, and 1998, respectively.

He is currently a professor in the School of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, China.

His research interests include multimedia group communication, NGI, IP/DWDM optical Internet and mobile wireless Internet. He has published over 100 technical papers in the above areas.

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