In ad hoc networks, broadcast forwarding protocols called OR (opportunistic routing) have been proposed to gain path diversity for higher packet delivery rates and shorter end-to-end delays. In general backoff-based OR protocols, each receiver autonomously makes a forwarding decision by using certain metrics to determine if a random backoff time is to be applied. However, each forwarder candidate must wait for the expiration of the backoff timer before forwarding a packet. Moreover, they cannot gain path diversity if the forwarding path includes local sparse areas, and this degrades performance as it strongly depends on the terminal density. In this paper, we propose a novel OR protocol called PRIOR (prioritized forwarding for opportunistic routing). In PRIOR, a terminal, called a prioritized forwarder and which forwards packets without using a backoff time, is selected from among the neighbours. In addition, PRIOR uses lightweight hop-by-hop retransmission control to mitigate the effect of terminal density. Moreover, we introduce an enhancement to PRIOR to reduce unnecessary forwarding by using an explicit acknowledgement. We evaluate PRIOR in comparison with conventional protocols in computer simulations.

Most P2PTV systems select a neighbor peer in an overlay network using RTT or a random method without considering the underlying network. Streaming traffic is shared over a network without localization awareness, which is a serious problem for Internet Service Providers. In this paper, we present a novel scheme to achieve P2PTV traffic localization by inserting delay into P2P streaming packets, so that the length of the inserted delay depends on the AS hop distance between a peer and its neighbor peer. Experiments conducted on a real network show that our proposed scheme can perform efficient traffic localization.

Multicasting is a remarkable technology that can effectively provide point-to-multipoint communications. The multicast communication can substantially decrease traffic in a network and thus save network resources and transmission costs. If multicasting is applied to a content delivery system, however, the transmission speed must be set to the lowest one among the available capacities of links on the multicast tree for all client terminals to receive the contents simultaneously. This type of problem is especially serious for heterogeneous networks. This paper studies effective content delivery systems for non-real-time point-to-multipoint services over heterogeneous environments and proposes an adaptive delivery system to select multicasting and store-and-forward transferring data streams. The results obtained by computer simulation show that our proposed system can reduce delivery time and that it is scalable to large networks and robust against variations in network size as well as environmental heterogeneities.

Satellite-terrestrial (ST) networks, in which many nodes are interconnected by both satellite and terrestrial networks, can efficiently support multicast services. This is because satellite broadcasting is suitable for a large multicast group and a terrestrial network is suitable for a small multicast group. An ST network requires a multicast routing algorithm that can select the appropriate satellite and terrestrial routes. Conventional dynamic routing algorithms for terrestrial networks cannot construct an efficient multicast routing tree because they basically select a less-expensive route when a node is added. We have developed a dynamic routing algorithm, a virtual-cost-based algorithm, for ST networks that selects the route to use according to the multicast group size when a node is added to the group. Simulation showed that the proposed algorithm is advantageous when nodes are added to or removed from the multicast group during steady-state simulation.

The many-to-one communication nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) leads to an unbalanced traffic distribution, and, accordingly, sensor nodes closer to the base station have to transmit more packets than those at the periphery of the network. This problem causes the nodes closer to the base station to deplete their energy prematurely, forming a hole surrounding the base station. This phenomenon is called the energy hole problem, and it severely reduces the network lifetime. In this paper, we present a cooperative power-aware routing algorithm for uniformly deployed WSNs. The proposed algorithm is based on the idea of replacing the constant transmission range of relaying sensor nodes with an adjusted transmission range, in such a way that each individual node consumes its energy smoothly. We formulate the dynamic transmission range adjustment optimization (DTA) problem as a 0-1 Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem (0-1 MCKP) and present a dynamic programming method to solve the optimization problem. Simulations confirm that the proposed method helps to balance the energy consumption of sensor nodes, avoiding the energy hole problem and extending the network lifetime.

Many new multimedia applications involve multiple dynamically changing participants, have stringent source-to-end delay requirements, and consume large amounts of network resources. A conventional algorithm that allows "two coming paths," where nodes in a multicast tree transmit several identical data flows, is therefore not practical. We have developed an algorithm for delay-constrained dynamic routing. This algorithm uses a QoS label to prevent the occurrence of "two coming paths," and can construct an efficient multicast tree for any traffic volume. The proposed algorithm was superior to conventional routing algorithms in terms of cost when nodes were added to or removed from the multicast group during a steady-state simulation.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a promising approach for a variety of applications. Routing protocol for WSNs is very challenging because it should be simple, scalable, energy-efficient, and robust to deal with a very large number of nodes, and also self-configurable to node failures and changes of the network topology dynamically. Recently, many researchers have focused on developing hierarchical protocols for WSNs. However, most protocols in the literatures cannot scale well to large sensor networks and difficult to apply in the real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive routing protocol for WSNs called ARPEES. The main design features of the proposed method are: energy efficiency, dynamic event clustering, and multi-hop relay considering the trade-off relationship between the residual energy available of relay nodes and distance from the relay node to the base station. With a distributed and light overhead traffic approach, we spread energy consumption required for aggregating data and relaying them to different sensor nodes to prolong the lifetime of the whole network. In this method, we consider energy and distance as the parameters in the proposed function to select relay nodes and finally select the optimal path among cluster heads, relay nodes and the base station. The simulation results show that our routing protocol achieves better performance than other previous routing protocols.

This paper focuses on the bandwidth allocation methods based on real user experience for web browsing applications. Because the Internet and its services are rapidly increasing, the bandwidth allocation problem has become one of the typical challenges for Internet service providers (ISPs) and network planning with respect to providing high service quality. The quality of experience (QoE) plays an important role in the success of services, and the guarantee of QoE accordingly represents an important goal in network resource control schemes. To cope with this issue, this paper proposes two user-centric bandwidth resource allocation methods for web browsing applications. The first method dynamically allocates bandwidth by considering the same user's satisfaction in terms of QoE with respect to all users in the system, whereas the second method introduces an efficient trade-off between the QoE of each user group and the average QoE of all users. The purpose of these proposals is to provide a flexible solution to reasonably allocate limited network resources to users. By considering service quality from real users' perception viewpoint, the proposed allocation methods enable us to understand actual users' experiences. Compared to previous works, the numerical results show that the proposed bandwidth allocation methods achieve the following contributions: improving the QoE level for dissatisfied users and providing a fair distribution, as well as retaining a reasonable average QoE.

This paper proposes a new dynamic multicast routing algorithm for layered streams. Since a layered multicast technique accommodates different types of users in the same multicast group, it helps to provide multicast services in a heterogeneous environment. However, this makes it difficult to construct an efficient routing tree when receivers join or leave a multicast session dynamically. In the proposed algorithm, we adopt a pre-determined path approach to handle such dynamic membership of a layered multicast session without the burden of much additional traffic. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can minimize the average multicast tree cost, and that it works well on large-scale networks and those with traffic heterogeneity and a small number of routing control messages.

This paper proposes two algorithms to balance energy consumption among sensor nodes by distributing the workload of image compression tasks within a cluster on wireless sensor networks. The main point of the proposed algorithms is to adopt the energy threshold, which is used when we implement the exchange and/or assignment of tasks among sensor nodes. The threshold is well adaptive to the residual energy of sensor nodes, input image, compressed output, and network parameters. We apply the lapped transform technique, an extended version of the discrete cosine transform, and run length encoding before Lempel-Ziv-Welch coding to the proposed algorithms to improve both quality and compression rate in image compression scheme. We extensively conduct computational experiments to verify the our methods and find that the proposed algorithms achieve not only balancing the total energy consumption among sensor nodes and, thus, increasing the overall network lifetime, but also reducing block noise in image compression.

With conventional dynamic routing algorithms, many query messages are required in a distributed environment for efficient multicast routing of any traffic volume. We have developed a dynamic routing algorithm that uses a predetermined path search in which an appropriate multicast path is dynamically constructed by searching only a few nodes. This algorithm can construct an efficient multicast tree for any traffic volume. Simulation has shown that the proposed algorithm is advantageous compared with conventional dynamic routing algorithms when nodes are added to or removed from the multicast group during steady-state simulation.

Most peer-to-peer (P2P) systems build their own overlay networks for implementing peer selection strategies without taking into account the locality on the underlay network. As a result, a large quantity of traffic crossing internet service providers (ISPs) or autonomous systems (ASes) is generated on the Internet. Controlling the P2P traffic is therefore becoming a big challenge for the ISPs. To control the cost of the cross-ISP/AS traffic, ISPs often throttle and/or even block P2P applications in their networks. In this paper, we propose a router-aided approach for localizing the P2P traffic hierarchically; it features the insertion of additional delay into each P2P packet based on geographical location of its destination. Compared to the existing approaches that solve the problem on the application layer, our proposed method does not require dedicated servers, cooperation between ISPs and P2P users, or modification of existing P2P application software. Therefore, the proposal can be easily utilized by all types of P2P applications. Experiments on P2P streaming applications indicate that our hierarchical traffic localization method not only reduces significantly the inter-domain traffic but also maintains a good performance of P2P applications.