PAMPA in the wild: a real-life evaluation of a lightweight ad-hoc broadcasting family

Broadcast is one of the core building blocks of many services deployed on ad-hoc wireless networks, such as Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) or Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Most broadcast protocols are however only ever evaluated using simulations, which have repeatedly been shown to be unreliable, and potentially misleading. In this paper, we seek to go beyond simulations, and consider the particular case of PAMPA, a promising family of wireless broadcast algorithms for ad-hoc and wireless networks. We report on our efforts to further our experimental understanding of PAMPA, and present the first ever characterisation of the PAMPA family on a real deployment. Here it has to deal with real network problems such as node, message and sending failure. Our experiments show that the standard PAMPA algorithm out-performs all other protocols in the family, with a delivery ratio consistently around 75%, and a retransmission ratio as low as 44%, for a failure-free run. We use this opportunity to reflect on our findings and lessons learnt when moving from simulations to actual experimentsab.

[1]  Christian F. Tschudin,et al.  A large-scale testbed for reproducible ad hoc protocol evaluations , 2002, 2002 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Record. WCNC 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8609).

[2]  Indranil Gupta,et al.  Smart Gossip: An Adaptive Gossip-based Broadcasting Service for Sensor Networks , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems.

[3]  André Schiper,et al.  On the accuracy of MANET simulators , 2002, POMC '02.

[4]  Wei Peng,et al.  On the reduction of broadcast redundancy in mobile ad hoc networks , 2000, 2000 First Annual Workshop on Mobile and Ad Hoc Networking and Computing. MobiHOC (Cat. No.00EX444).

[5]  Vaduvur Bharghavan,et al.  Routing in ad-hoc networks using minimum connected dominating sets , 1997, Proceedings of ICC'97 - International Conference on Communications.

[6]  Joseph Y. Halpern,et al.  Gossip-based ad hoc routing , 2002, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[7]  James Brown,et al.  The Impact of Temperature on Outdoor Industrial Sensornet Applications , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.

[8]  Paola Batistoni,et al.  International Conference , 2001 .

[9]  Jason Liu,et al.  Experimental evaluation of wireless simulation assumptions , 2004, MSWiM '04.

[10]  Jie Wu,et al.  A Dominating-Set-Based Routing Scheme in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks , 2001, Telecommun. Syst..

[11]  Ioannis Chatzigiannakis,et al.  Flexible experimentation in wireless sensor networks , 2012, Commun. ACM.

[12]  Tracy Camp,et al.  MANET simulation studies: the incredibles , 2005, MOCO.

[13]  Kimmo E. E. Raatikainen,et al.  A Power-Aware Broadcasting Algorithm , 2006, 2006 IEEE 17th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[14]  François Ingelrest,et al.  Localized broadcast incremental power protocol for wireless ad hoc networks , 2005, 10th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'05).

[15]  Gordon S. Blair,et al.  Experiences with open overlays: a middleware approach to network heterogeneity , 2008, Eurosys '08.

[16]  John Anderson,et al.  An analysis of a large scale habitat monitoring application , 2004, SenSys '04.

[17]  Adrian Holzer,et al.  Six-Shot Broadcast: A Context-Aware Algorithm for Efficient Message Diffusion in MANETs , 2008, OTM Conferences.

[18]  François Ingelrest,et al.  Localized Broadcast Incremental Power Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks , 2005, ISCC.

[19]  Anthony Ephremides,et al.  Energy-Efficient Broadcast and Multicast Trees in Wireless Networks , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[20]  Roy Friedman,et al.  RAPID: Reliable Probabilistic Dissemination in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks , 2007, 2007 26th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2007).

[21]  François Taïani,et al.  Count on me: lightweight ad-hoc broadcasting in heterogeneous topologies , 2009, M-PAC '09.

[22]  Todd R. Andel,et al.  On the credibility of manet simulations , 2006, Computer.

[23]  Anis Laouiti,et al.  Multipoint relaying for flooding broadcast messages in mobile wireless networks , 2002, Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[24]  Thomas Noël,et al.  Using SensLAB as a First Class Scientific Tool for Large Scale Wireless Sensor Network Experiments , 2011, Networking.

[25]  Samir Khuller,et al.  Approximation Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets , 1996, Algorithmica.

[26]  Dhiraj K. Pradhan,et al.  A Cluster-based Approach for Routing in Ad-Hoc Networks , 1995, Symposium on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing.

[27]  Utz Roedig,et al.  Type-safe updating for modular WSN software , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS).

[28]  François Ingelrest,et al.  RNG Relay Subset Flooding Protocols in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks , 2003, Int. J. Found. Comput. Sci..

[29]  Yu-Chee Tseng,et al.  The Broadcast Storm Problem in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network , 1999, Wirel. Networks.

[30]  François Taïani,et al.  PAMPA in the wild: a real-life evaluation of a lightweight ad-hoc broadcasting family , 2012, MidSens.

[31]  Elyes Ben Hamida,et al.  Impact of the Physical Layer Modeling on the Accuracy and Scalability of Wireless Network Simulation , 2009, Simul..