We are motivated by the need, in some applications, for impromptu or as-you-go deployment of wireless sensor networks. A person walks along a line, making link quality measurements with the previous relay at equally spaced locations, and deploys relays at some of these locations, so as to connect a sensor placed on the line with a sink at the start of the line. In this paper, we extend our earlier work on the problem (see [1]) to incorporate two new aspects: (i) inclusion of path outage in the deployment objective, and (ii) permitting the deployment agent to make measurements over several consecutive steps before selecting a placement location among them (which we call backtracking). We consider a light traffic regime, and formulate the problem as a Markov decision process. Placement algorithms are obtained for two cases: (i) the distance to the source is geometrically distributed with known mean, and (ii) the average cost per step case. We motivate the per-step cost function in terms of several known forwarding protocols for sleep-wake cycling wireless sensor networks. We obtain the structures of the optimal policies for the various formulations, and provide some sensitivity results about the policies and the optimal values. We then provide a numerical study of the algorithms, thus providing insights into the advantage of backtracking, and a comparison with simple heuristic placement policies.
In the framework of @cite_1 , the deployment agent can only move forward. In the present paper we introduce backtracking," which permits the deployment agent to compare the link qualities over several potential placement locations before deploying the relay at any one of them.
@cite_1
2952542244 2122027153 2336775896 1984466682
We study the problem of optimal sequential ("as-you-go") deployment of wireless relay nodes as a person walks along a line of random length (with a known distribution). The objective is to create an impromptu multihop wireless network for connecting a packet source to be placed at the end of the line with a sink node located at the starting point, to operate in the light traffic regime. As the deployment person walks along the line from the sink towards the source, at every step, he measures the channel quality to one (or more) previously placed relays, and places the relay nodes based on these measurements, so as to minimize either the sum power or the maximum power from the source to the sink node in the resultant network, subject to a constraint on the expected number of relays placed. For each of these two objectives, two different relay selection strategies are considered: (i) each relay communicates with the sink via its immediate previous relay, (ii) the communication path can skip some of the deployed relays. With appropriate modeling assumptions, we formulate each of these problems as a Markov decision process (MDP). We provide the optimal policy structures for all these cases, and provide illustrations, via numerical results, for some typical parameters. Our work is motivated by impromptu (or ''as-you-go'') deployment of wireless relay nodes along a path, a need that arises in many situations. In this paper, the path is modeled as starting at the origin (where there is the data sink, e.g., the control center), and evolving randomly over a lattice in the positive quadrant. A person walks along the path deploying relay nodes as he goes. At each step, the path can, randomly, either continue in the same direction or take a turn, or come to an end, at which point a data source (e.g., a sensor) has to be placed, that will send packets to the data sink. A decision has to be made at each step whether or not to place a wireless relay node. Assuming that the packet generation rate by the source is very low, and simple link-by-link scheduling, we consider the problem of sequential relay placement so as to minimize the expectation of an end-to-end cost metric (a linear combination of the sum of convex hop costs and the number of relays placed). This impromptu relay placement problem is formulated as a total cost Markov decision process. First, we derive the optimal policy in terms of an optimal placement set and show that this set is characterized by a boundary (with respect to the position of the last placed relay) beyond which it is optimal to place the next relay. Next, based on a simpler one-step-look-ahead characterization of the optimal policy, we propose an algorithm which is proved to converge to the optimal placement set in a finite number of steps and which is faster than value iteration. We show by simulations that the distance threshold based heuristic, usually assumed in the literature, is close to the optimal, provided that the threshold distance is carefully chosen. In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of deploying relays in outdoor millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks. We study the coverage probability from sources to a destination for such systems aided by relays. The sources and the relays are modeled as independent homogeneous Poisson point processes (PPPs). We present a relay modeling technique for mmWave networks considering blockages and compute the density of active relays that aid the transmission. Two relay selection techniques are discussed, namely best path selection and best relay selection. For the first technique, we provide a closed form expression for end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and compute the best random relay path in a mmWave network using order statistics. Moreover, the maximum end-to-end SNR of random relay paths is investigated asymptotically by using extreme value theory. For the second technique, we provide a closed form expression for the best relay node having the maximum path gain. Finally, we analyze the coverage probability and transmission capacity of the network and validate them with simulation results. Our results show that deploying relays in mmWave networks can increase the coverage probability and transmission capacity of such systems. The paper studies broadcasting in radio networks whose stations are represented by points in the Euclidean plane. In any given time step, a station can either receive or transmit. A message transmitted from station (v) is delivered to every station (u) at distance at most (1) from (v), but (u) successfully hears the message if and only if (v) is the only station at distance at most (1) from (u) that transmitted in this time step. A designated source station has a message that should be disseminated throughout the network. All stations other than the source are initially idle and wake up upon the first time they hear the source message. It is shown in [11] that the time complexity of broadcasting depends on two parameters of the network, namely, its diameter (in hops) (D) and a lower bound (d) on the Euclidean distance between any two stations. The inverse of (d) is called the granularity of the network, denoted by (g). Specifically, the authors of [11] present a broadcasting algorithm that works in time (O (D g)) and prove that every broadcasting algorithm requires Ω (D √g) time. In this paper, we distinguish between the arbitrary deployment setting, originally studied in [11], in which stations can be placed everywhere in the plane, and the new grid deployment setting, in which stations are only allowed to be placed on a (d)-spaced grid. Does the latter (more restricted) setting provides any speedup in broadcasting time complexity? Although the (O (D g)) broadcasting algorithm of [11] works under the (original) arbitrary deployment setting, it turns out that the Ω (D √g) lower bound remains valid under the grid deployment setting. Still, the above question is left unanswered. The current paper answers this question affirmatively by presenting a provable separation between the two deployment settings. We establish a tight lower bound on the time complexity of broadcasting under the arbitrary deployment setting proving that broadcasting cannot be completed in less than Ω ( D √g) time. For the grid deployment setting, we develop a broadcasting algorithm that runs in time O ( D g5 6 log g), thus breaking the linear dependency on (g).