Alhussein A. Abouzeid

Assistant Professor

Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Dept.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Troy, New York 12180-3590

Office: Room 6038, Jonsson Engineering Center

Tel: (518) 276-6534 Fax: (518) 276-4403

E - Mail: abouzeid/@/ecse.rpi.edu

 

 

Following is a list of recent research directions and sample of related publications. Also I have recently (9/06) prepared a set of slides clustering some of the most recent research results.

 


Information Theory and Routing Protocols

 Motivation: The significance of characterizing the overhead is that routing overhead may dominate network traffic. Since routing protocols need to adjust to topology changes, a routing overhead is incurred, represented by the exchange of routing messages. For networks with frequent change, such overhead may become a significant limit on the scalability and effective capacity. The results below apply to link-state routing and geographic routing protocols. A manuscript for reactive protocols has been submitted for review.

Approach: The key idea behind this work is that we propose to treat a variable topology network as a physical system that exhibits random (topology) changes. The minimum routing overhead is related to the minimum amount of information needed to identify the current state of the system (i.e. the current network topology). The various topology changes are derived from the probability distribution describing the individual node mobility. Thus the routing overhead can be related to the entropy rate of the system. Further, we differentiate between different types of routing protocols based on the subset of changes that are relevant to the specific class of protocols under study. For example, proactive protocols keep track of any change in the system (i.e. network), while reactive protocols keep track of a subset of the system changes (those changes that affect nodes/links actively participating in routing packets).

Links: Presentation to DARPA ITMANET workshop; Project web page.

·        N. Zhou and A.A. Abouzeid, “Routing in Ad Hoc Networks: A Theoretical Framework with Practical Implications,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, submitted April 2004, revised August 2006.

·        N. Bisnik and A.A. Abouzeid, “Capacity Deficit in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Due to Geographic Protocols Overhead,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, submitted September 2006.

·        N. Zhou and A. Abouzeid, “Routing in Ad Hoc Networks: A Theoretical Framework with Practical Implications,” in Proceedings of 24th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’2005), Miami, FL, USA, March 2005.

·        N. Bisnik, A. A. Abouzeid, “Rate-Distortion Bounds on Location-Based Routing Protocol Overheads in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks” Proceedings of Forty Fourth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, Sept. 2006.


Infinitely Scalable Reactive Routing Protocols in Unreliable Networks

This work develops a mathematical and simulative framework for quantifying the overhead of reactive routing protocols, such as dynamic source routing and ad hoc on-demand distance vector, in wireless variable topology (ad hoc) networks. Two network models are analyzed; a Manhattan grid model for the case of regular node placement, and a Poisson model for the case of random node placement. We focus on situations where the nodes are stationary but unreliable. One of the key insights that can be drawn from the mathematical results of this paper is that it is possible to design infinitely scalable reactive routing protocols for variable topology networks by judicious engineering of the traffic patterns to satisfy certain “statistical locality” discovered in this research.

Presentation at Princeton ISS seminar; Project web page.

·        N. Zhou, H. Wu and A. Abouzeid, “Reactive Routing Overhead in Networks with Unreliable Nodes,” Proceedings of Ninth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’03), San Diego, CA, USA, September, 2003.

·        N. Zhou, H. Wu and A. A. Abouzeid, “The Impact of Traffic Patterns on the Overhead of Reactive Routing Protocols,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Special Issue on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, 23(3):547-60, March 2005.

·        Huaming Wu and A. A. Abouzeid, "Analysis of A Cluster-based Routing Protocol Overhead in An Unreliable Network", in Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’04), Vol.4 pp.2557-62, Atlanta, GA, March 2004.


Queuing Networks Analysis of Delay &Throughput of Random Access Ad Hoc and Mesh Networks

This work considers the throughput vs. delay (including queuing) in random access multi-hop wireless networks employing random access schemes, in addition to (for mesh networks) controlled access schemes at the MAC layer, and multi-hop routing at the network layer.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as a promising means of providing connectivity to communities in both affluent and poor parts of the world. The presence of backbone mesh routers and the use of multiple channels and interfaces allow mesh networks to have better capacity than infrastructure-less multihop ad hoc networks. In this work characterize the average delay and capacity in WMNs that utilize random medium access (MAC).We model residential area WMNs as open G/G/1 queuing networks. The analytical model takes into account the density of the mesh clients and mesh routers, the random packet arrival process, the degree of locality of traffic and the collision avoidance mechanism of random access MAC. We obtain closed form expressions for (a) end-to-end packet delay and (b) maximum achievable per-node throughput. The analytical results describe how the performance of WMNs scales with the number of mesh routers and clients. The results obtained from simulations agree closely with the analytical results. For the asymptotic case (as the network size grows indefinitely), we discuss how the results obtained using the proposed queuing network framework compare against previous well known results on asymptotic capacity of infrastructure-less ad hoc networks.

·        N. Bisnik and A.A. Abouzeid, “Queuing Network Models for Delay Analysis of Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” Proceedings of International Symposium on Wireless Local and Personal Area Networks, International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2006), July 2006, Vancouver, Canada.

·        N. Bisnik and A.A. Abouzeid, “Queuing Delay and Achievable Throughput in Random Access Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” Proceedings of The 2006 IEEE International Workshop on Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (IWWAN 2006), June 2006, New York, NY.

·        N. Bisnik and A.A. Abouzeid, “Delay and Throughput in Random Access Wireless Mesh Networks,” Proceedings of The 2006 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC’2006), June 2006, Istanbul, Turkey.


Random Walk in Ad Hoc Networks

Locating a resource or service efficiently is one of the most important issues related to unstructured decentralized peer-to-peer networks. The objective of a search mechanism is to successfully locate resources while incurring low overhead and low delay. In order to fulfill this objective, several random walk based search algorithms have been proposed for resource discovery in decentralized peer-to-peer networks. However, no analytical model has been proposed to quantify the effect of parameters of random walk, such as the number and time to live (TTL) of random walkers, on the performance of search algorithms. In this work we develop a mathematical model for random walk search in a peer-to-peer network. Using the model we derive analytical expressions for the performance metrics, such as delay, overhead and success rate, of the search in terms of the popularity of the resource being searched for and the parameters of random walk. We propose an algorithm that uses the analytical expressions in order to adaptively set the parameters of random walk so that it maintains a certain minimum level of performance. The algorithm is referred to as Equation Based Adaptive Search (EBAS). We also propose a method for maintaining popularity estimates of the resources in the network. The work in this paper is based on an important recent observation regarding the relationship between random walk and uniform sampling.

·        N. Bisnik and A. Abouzeid, “Modeling and Analysis of Random Walk Search Algorithms in P2P Networks,” in Proceedings of IEEE Second International Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-Peer Systems (Hot-P2P 05), San Diego, CA, July, 2005.


Stochastic Event Capture Using Mobile Sensors

Mobile sensors cover more area over a period of time than the same number of stationary sensors. However, the quality of coverage achieved by mobile sensors depends on velocity, mobility pattern and number of mobile sensors deployed and the dynamics of the phenomenon being sensed. This research considers the gains attained, if any, by mobile sensors over static sensors and the optimal motion strategies for mobile sensors.

·        N. Bisnik, A.A. Abouzeid and V. Isler, “Stochastic Event Capture in Mobile Sensor Networks Subject to a Quality Metric,” Proceedings of The Twelfth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom 2006), Los Angeles, CA, Sept. 2006.


Energy Efficient Coverage with Directional Sensors

We study a new “coverage by directional sensors” problem with tunable orientations on a set of discrete targets. This is an Integer Linear Programming problem, which we formulate as bi-objective and single-objective optimization. We consider centralized as well as distributed solutions of this problem, and evaluate the properties of the proposed solutions and algorithms in terms of providing coverage and maximizing network lifetime through mathematical analysis and extensive simulations.

·        J. Ai and A. A. Abouzeid, “Coverage by Directional Sensors in Randomly Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks” Journal of Combinatorial Optimization (Springer), Special Issue on Network Applications, 11(1):21-24, February 2006.

·        J. Ai and A. A. Abouzeid, “Coverage by Directional Sensors,” Proceedings of 4th Intl. Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2006), Boston, MA, April 3-7, 2006.

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Optimal Stochastic Decision Policies in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

·        J. Ai, Z. Ye and A. A. Abouzeid, “Cross-layer Optimal Decision Policies for Spatial Diversity Forwarding in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” in Proceedings of The Third IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS’06), October, 2006, Vancouver, Canada.

·        Z. Ye, A.A. Abouzeid and J. Ai, “Optimal Policies for Distributed Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks,” submitted.

 


Image Communication in Ad-Hoc/Sensor Networks

·        A. A. Abouzeid and H. Wu, “Energy Efficient Distributed Image Compression in Resource-Constrained Multihop Networks,” Computer Communications (Elsevier), 28(14):1658-1668, Sept. 2005.

·        H. Wu and A. A. Abouzeid, “Error Resilient Image Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Computer Networks (Elsevier), to appear.

·        H. Wu and A.A. Abouzeid, "Power Aware Image Transmission in Energy Constrained Wireless Networks," in Proceedings of the 9th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Vol.1 pages 202-7, Alexandria, Egypt, June 2004.

·        H. Wu and A. Abouzeid, "Energy Efficient Distributed JPEG2000 Image Compression in Multihop Wireless Networks," in Proceedings of the 4th workshop on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks (ASWN), Boston, Massachusetts, August 2004.

·        H. Wu and A. Abouzeid, “Error Resilient Image Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of 5th Workshop on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks (ASWN’05), Paris, France, July, 2005.