ALBA: AN ADAPTIVE LOAD-BALANCED ALGORITHM FOR GEOGRAPHIC FORWARDING IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Michele Zorzi

University of Padova


Résumé:

In this talk, we present ALBA, a novel cross-layer scheme for ad hoc and sensor networks based on geographic routing, channel contention, and load balancing. By explicitly including congestion metrics in the access/forwarding scheme, ALBA's relay selection mechanism avoids nodes that are heavily loaded, and is able to successfully handle higher traffic loads than comparable solutions. Extensive simulations show that ALBA can significantly outperform GeRaF and MACRO, two recently proposed cross-layer approaches with similar goals. The results show that our design achieves very good delivery and latency performance, and can greatly limit energy consumption. We also present Rainbow, an additional feature of ALBA that makes it possible to completely solve the problem of dead ends (typical of greedy geographic routing) without resorting to network planarization techniques. More importantly, unlike other solutions currently available in the literature, ALBA with Rainbow (ALBA-R) is robust against localization errors and realistic propagation models, while being completely distributed. An extensive set of simulations demonstrates that ALBA.R is scalable, generates negligible overhead, and outperforms similar solutions with respect to all the metrics of interest investigated, especially in sparse topologies, notoriously the toughest benchmark for geographic routing protocols. Michele Zorzi is a Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. Prior to his current appointment, he was employed at the Politecnico di Milano, the University of Ferrara and the University of California at San Diego, with which he still has an active collaboration. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova in 1994. Michele was the EiC of the IEEE Wireless Communications magazine in 2003-2005, is now the EiC of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and has served on the Editorial Boards of the top journals in his area of research and on the Organizing and Technical Program Committee for many international conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow. His main research interest are in the area of wireless communications and networking, ad hoc and sensor network, and energy-efficient protocol design. S


Michele Zorzi
University of Padova