On multihop wireless network management: measurement, modeling and control

Multihop wireless networks are becoming a new attractive communication paradigm owing to their low cost and ease of deployment. Managing multihop wireless networks, however, is especially challenging due to a fluctuating wireless medium, presence of wireless interference, and the increasing demand for them to scale to large sizes. This dissertation tackles the multihop wireless network management chal- lenges by systematically integrating measurement, modeling and control. On the measurement and modeling side, this dissertation develops a novel probabilistic region-based localization algorithm to accurately determine node locations with limited and noisy measurement information. The dissertation further develops a general model of wireless interference to estimate throughput and goodput between arbitrary pairs of nodes in the presence of interference from other nodes in a wire- less network. Our model advances state of the art in interference modeling by (i) estimating interference among an arbitrary number of senders, (ii) modeling uni- cast transmissions, and (iii) modeling the general case of heterogeneous nodes with different traffic demands. On the control side, we investigated one of the most im- portant network control problems – design of routing protocols for large wireless networks. We developed a new routing protocol, Small State and Small Stretch (S4) to jointly minimize routing state and routing stretch. S4 uses a combination of beacon distance-vector based global routing state and scoped distance-vector based local routing state to achieve a worst-case stretch of 3 using O(√N) routing state per node in an N-node network. Its performance benefits are further demonstrated in extensive simulation and testbed experiments.