Routing protocols in communication networks rely on routing table entries ("states") to
make decisions on how to forward packets. The routing table state typically maps an ID
(eg: destination address) to a locator. The locator specifies how to reach the node with
the given ID. If paths to a node change, the states corresponding to the ID of the node
become invalid. For resilient routing, states should always be up-to-date. As the network
size increases and it becomes more dynamic, most routing table entries at every router
must be updated. A natural consequence is the huge increase in control traffic that crowds
out the network capacity.
For such large and dynamic networks, we propose to use probabilistic routing tables,
where routing table entries are considered as a probabilistic hints (called weak state),
and not absolute truth. Weak state can be locally refreshed (i.e. without the need for
explicit control traffic or updates that traverse the network) by reducing the associated
confidence value, a measure of the probability that the state is accurate. We build routing
protocols using the concept of weak state for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and
delay tolerant networks (DTNs).
For MANETs, we propose the Weak State Routing (WSR) protocol that uses the
concept of random directional walks (i.e. walks in randomly chosen directions) as a
primitive both for disseminating weak state, and for forwarding packets. In particular,
when a random directional walk for forwarding a packet reaches a node, it consults the
weak-state at the node, and biases its walk direction if the node has stronger information
(in terms of confidence) about the destination location.
In DTNs, an additional challenge is that a complete path may never exist between
a source-destination pair and routing is achieved by the store-carry-forward paradigm.
Intermittent connectivity also prevents the control messages from diffusing in the network.
Hence, it is difficult to maintain consistent routing states. We propose Weak State
Routing protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks (WSR-D) that uses explicit mappings with
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weak states. Weak state is particularly useful for DTNs because it has probabilistic semantics
and can be refreshed locally. WSR-D disseminates weak state using a local osmosis
mechanism. It employs a biasing technique similar to that of WSR. WSR-D exploits node
mobility rather than node positions. A packet is forwarded to an intermediate node only
if it is moving in a direction closer to the direction given by the biasing weak state.
Our simulation results show that WSR offers a high packet delivery ratio, more
than 98%. Protocol overhead scales as O(N), N being the number of nodes. The state
complexity of the protocol is (N3=2). Even though packets follow paths longer than the
shortest paths, the average path length is asymptotically efficient and scales as O(p N).
Despite longer paths, WSRs end-to-end packet delivery delay is much smaller than the
prior work because of the dramatic reduction in control traffic overhead. WSR-D achieves
very high delivery ratio even when the buffer space in the nodes is limited. It reduces the
number of packet transfers between nodes in comparison to prior work at the cost of
increased delay.
We also investigate the effect of state weak-ness on the consistency of information.
We define two metrics, pure distortion and informed distortion, to evaluate the consistency
of the weak state paradigm and compare it against strong state (i.e. deterministic state that
relies on explicit refresh messages to remain valid). Pure distortion measures the average
gap between the actual value of the state and the value maintained at a remote node.
On the other hand, the use of confidence increases the protocol's ability to cope with
even large pure distortion. The resulting effective distortion is captured by the informed
distortion metric. We analytically show that weak state causes significantly less distortion
values than strong state.
In the final part of this dissertation, we investigate the random walks on dynamic
time-graphs. Random walks form the basis of the unstructured methods. We investigate
the effect of dynamism in the network on the random walk performance, which is a strong
indicator of network connectivity. Such networks are modeled by a novel 3-mode adjacency
tensor. The expected hitting time of a random walk in a dynamic network is small if
the network is well connected. The representation also leads to the information whether
a node can be reached by another node after a certain number of time steps, which is
indicated by reachability tensor. We unfold the reachability tensor around the mode or
dimension that models time to obtain a matrix. Our experiments show that the correlation
between the expected hitting time and the second singular-value of this matrix is above
0.95. Hence, it is a strong indicator of network connectivity. |