| Summary: | The delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is characterized by frequent disconnections and long delays of links among devices due to mobility, sparse deployment of devices, attacks, and noise, etc. Considerable research efforts have been devoted recently to DTNs enabling communications between network entities with intermittent connectivity. Unfortunately, mobile devices have limited energy capacity, and the fundamental problem is that traditional power-saving mechanisms are designed assuming well connected networks. Due to much larger inter-contact durations than contact durations, devices spend most of their life time in the neighbor discovery, and centralized power-saving strategies are difficult. Consequently, mobile devices consume a significant amount of energy in the neighbor discovery, rather than in infrequent data transfers. Therefore, distributed energy efficient neighbor discovery protocols for DTNs are essential to minimize the degradation of network connectivity and maximize the benefits from mobility.
In this thesis, we develop sleep scheduling protocols in the medium access control (MAC) layer that are adaptive and distributed under different clock synchronization conditions: synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-asynchronous. In addition, we propose a distributed clock synchronization protocol to mitigate the clock synchronization problem in DTNs. Our research accomplishments are briefly outlined as follows:
Firstly, we design an adaptive exponential beacon (AEB) protocol. By exploiting the trend of contact availability, beacon periods are independently adjusted by each device and optimized using the distribution of contact durations. The AEB protocol significantly reduces energy consumption while maintaining comparable packet delivery delay and delivery ratio.
Secondly, we design two asynchronous clock based sleep scheduling (ACDS) protocols. Based on the fact that global clock synchronization is difficult to achieve in general, predetermined patterns of sleep schedules are constructed using hierarchical arrangements of cyclic difference sets such that devices independently selecting different duty cycle lengths are still guaranteed to have overlapping awake intervals with other devices within the communication range.
Thirdly, we design a distributed semi-asynchronous sleep scheduling (DSA) protocol. Although the synchronization error is unavoidable, some level of clock accuracy may be possible for many practical scenarios. The sleep schedules are constructed to guarantee contacts among devices having loosely synchronized clocks, and parameters are optimized using the distribution of synchronization error. We also define conditions for which the proposed semi-asynchronous protocol outperforms existing asynchronous sleep scheduling protocols.
Lastly, we design a distributed clock synchronization (DCS) protocol. The proposed protocol considers asynchronous and long delayed connections when exchanging relative clock information among nodes. As a result, smaller synchronization error achieved by the proposed protocol allows more accurate timing information and renders neighbor discovery more energy efficient.
The designed protocols improve the lifetime of mobile devices in DTNs by means of energy efficient neighbor discoveries that reduce the energy waste caused by idle listening problems.
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