Adaptive Load Balancing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Shouyi YIN, Xiaokang LIN

Department of Electronic Engineering Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R.China Email: shouyi00@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn which uses weighted round-robin heuristic-based scheduling strategy to distribute trafc among multiple paths. Round Trip Time (RTT) is used as the criterion for trafc distribution. And MSR outperforms than other load balancing mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a Prediction based Adaptive Load Balancing (PALB) mechanism. This mechanism is based on multipath routing protocol and trafc prediction. It is assumed that several disjoint paths between source and destination node have been established by a multiple path routing protocol such as [3] [6] [8]. PALB locates at source node and its objective is to minimize trafc congestion and load imbalance by adaptively distributing the trafc among multiple disjoint paths based on trafc prediction. Source node periodically predicts the cross-trafc of each node in the multiple disjoint paths and adjust trafc distribution across multiple disjoint paths. In order to predict trafc accurately, a trafc pattern is requiered. We analyze the trafc data collected from our ad hoc network testbed and nd out that ad hoc network trafc is self-similar. According to this feature, a wavelet analysis based trafc predictor is proposed to predict MANET trafc. The rest of paper is organized as follows. In section II, we present the statistical evidence of trafc self-similarity in MANET and propose the wavelet prediction method of selfsimilar trafc. In section III we propose the adaptive load balancing mechanism. Simulation results are provided in section IV. And section V summarizes the papers contributions. II. T RAFFIC S ELF -S IMILARITY AND T RAFFIC P REDICTION BASED ON WAVELET A NALYSIS A. Trafc Self-Similarity in MANET In order to capture the characteristics of ad hoc networks trafc, we collected millions of packets in our ad hoc network testbed. Figure 1 shows the topology of our testbed. This MANET testbed consists of 20 computers which run Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) [12] protocol on Linux [13] operation system. There are 15 laptops, as mobile nodes, numbered 1 to 15, and 5 desktop PCs, as stationary nodes, numbered 16 to 20. All these nodes are distributed in three separate rooms on the same oor of a fairly typical ofce building. It should be point out that the stationary nodes are placed near the window of each room. Because of the effect of indoor fading and the block of the walls, two nodes in different rooms can not communicate directly, except placing it near window. However, even the stationary nodes in room A and room C can not communicate directly with each other because of the wall blocking. Therefore nodes in different rooms must setup a multihop path to communicate with each

Abstract In this paper, we propose a prediction based adaptive load balancing mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks. This mechanism can cooperate with any kind of multipath source routing protocol. It distributes trafc load among multiple disjoint paths based on the measurement and prediction of network trafc. In order to predict network trafc accurately, we rst analyze the trafc data collected in our mobile ad hoc network testbed and nd out that ad hoc networks trafc is self-similar. Then we propose a trafc predictor based on wavelet analysis. The simulation results show that our loading balancing approach can distribute trafc properly and lead to the decrease of trafc load imbalance of multiple paths and network congestion. As a result, it reduces the end-to-end packet delay and packet dropping probability and balance the energy consumption of the network.

I. I NTRODUCTION In the recent years, a great portion of peoples attention has been given to Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) [1]. MANET consists of freely moving nodes operating not only as a terminal but also as a router that has the functionality to forward data. The nodes in MANET have limited communication resources, such as bandwidth, buffer space, battery power, etc. Resource constraints in MANET require the trafc to be properly distributed among the mobile hosts. Otherwise, heavily loaded hosts may cause congestion and large delay; even it may deplete energy quickly, which will lead to network partitions and failure of application sessions. Thus load balancing is emerging as a key tool to better use MANET resources and improve MANET performance. With load balancing, MANET can minimize trafc congestion and load imbalance, as a result, end-to-end packet delay can be minimized, mobile nodes lifetime can be maximized and network energy consumption can be balanced. There have been some works focuing on load balancing in ad hoc networks. In [7], [4] and [2], three load balancing routing protocols have been proposed and they are all single path routing. In these routing protocols, some new routing metrics which reect the the network load information is used as route selection criterion. Since multipath routing can provide improved throughput, route failure protection and load balancing as compared with single-path routing, some load balancing mechanisms based on multipath routing are proposed and outperform than those mechanisms based on single path routing [9]. In [5], probing-based feedback control is introduced to multipath routing. The number of congested packets on a route is used as load metric. In particular, in [6] the so-called MSR (Multipath Source Routing) is presented,

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room C
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Topology of the MANET Testbed

other. Generally the average depth of the path is 3 or 4 hops. Each computer equipped with Samsung or Intel IEEE 802.11b WLAN Cards. The mobile nodes can move among the three rooms and the corridor of the building with walking speed. We have collected trafc data of daily applications such as e-mail, WWW, FTP, video and audio on line from 11 October to 25 November 2003 at all nodes. Due to the length limitation of this paper, we only describe the analysis results of trafc data collected at node 2 from the period 24 October 2003 to 27 October 2003 and node 9 from the period 9 November 2003 to 11 November 2003. A summary description of the sample data is given in Table 1.
TABLE I S UMMARY DESCRIPTION OF THE TRAFFIC DATA

Furthermore we separate trafc data into the individual components representing trafc ows between each active pair of mobile nodes, or source-destination pairs. The sta30,161,484,093 31,902,471 Node 2 1 tistical analysis shows that the trafc ows are consistent with the ON/OF F model and that the distributions of the corresponding ON/OF F -periods tend to satisfy the heavy21,881,396,431 23,838,520 Node 9 2 tailed property. Therefore we can prove that self-similarity is a denite characteristic of MANET trafc rather than a strange coincidence. We use three methods to test for self-similarity and estimate the Hurst parameter-H, variance-time plot, R/S plot and B. Trafc Prediction based on Wavelet Analysis Whittle estimator [10]. Wavelet analysis is a powerful tool for treatment of nonFigure 2 gives the evidence of the self-similar nature of the stationary stochastic time series signals. We propose a trafc trafc of dataset 1. The gure shows plots for Variance-Time predictor based on wavelet decomposition and reconstrucplot (a) and R/S plot (b). The variance-time plot is linear and tion to predict self-similar trafc of MANET. Through trafestimated using regression as 0.32, yielding an estimate for c measurement, we can obtain a self-similar time-series H of 0.84. The R/S plot shows an asymptotic slope that is {x(0), x(1), ..., x(m)}, we use this trafc predictor to predict different from 0.5 and 1.0; it is estimated using regression as x(m+1). The prediction process includes three steps: wavelet 0.89, which is also the corresponding estimate of H. To get decomposition, wavelet reconstruction and prediction. the accurate estimate of Hurst parameter, the Whittle estimator Mallat pyramid algorithm [11] is used for decomposition is used nally. and reconstruction. The wavelet function and scaling function The accurate estimates of Hurst parameter are shown in are denoted as (t) and (t) respectively. The decomposition Table 2. Table 2 shows that on different aggregation level, formulas are shown as follows: the MANET trafc always show the feature of self-similarity, and m 60 is an appropriate aggregation level for dataset h0 (n 2k)xj (n) (1) xj+1 (k) = 1, yielding a point estimate H = 0.91 and a 95%-condence n
Dataset

Measurement Period Start of trace: Oct 24, 11:00 End of trace: Oct 27, 16:00 Start of trace: Nov 09, 9:00 End of trace: Nov 11, 23:00

Measurement Node

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interval [0.82, 0.99]. We performed similarly detailed stduies for dataset 2. The estimate of H is 0.82, which also implies the nature of self-similarity.
TABLE II W HITTLE E STIMATOR ESTIMATE H AND 95%- CONFIDENCE INTERVALS
Aggregation Level (m) 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
H
0.995195 0.990083 0.977935 0.931632 0.895480 0.912565 0.912923 0.915835 0.933891 0.926592

95% etalow 0.961344 0.942206 0.919371 0.863316 0.820401 0.828987 0.823849 0.820493 0.832729 0.820097

C.I. etaup 1.02905 1.03796 1.03650 0.999948 0.970562 0.994143 1.00200 1.01118 1.03505 1.03309

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dj+1 (k) =
n

h1 (n 2k)xj (n)

(2)

where 1 h0 (k) = 2 1 h1 (k) = 2 t ( ) (t k)dt 2 t ( ) (t k)dt 2 (3) (4)

which deal with stationary time-series can be used to predict x (m + 1) and dj (m + 1), (j = 1, 2, ..., J). In our method, autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model is used to predict x (m + 1) and dj (m + 1), (j = 1, 2, ..., J). After the prediction, we obtain (J + 1) new elements, x (m + 1) and dj (m + 1), (j = 1, 2, ..., J). Thus we obtain the prediction of x(m + 1) from x(m + 1) = x (m + 1) + d1 (m + 1) + ... + dJ (m + 1) (9) In practice, we nd that smooth time-scale J = 3 is the best tradeoff between computing complexity and prediction accuracy.

xj (k) denotes the approximation signal of x(k), which is decomposed by low pass lter with the smooth timescale j; and dj (k) denotes the noise signal of x(k), which is decomposed by high pass lter with the detail time-scale j. Applying the decomposition formula, we decompose original time-series {x(0), x(1), ..., x(m)} from time-scale 0 to J. After decomposition, (J + 1) time series are obtained, (xJ (0), xJ (1), ..., xJ (m/2J )) and (dj (0), dj (1), ..., dj (m/2j )), (j = 1, 2, ..., J), each time series have m/2j elements. The reconstruction formula of Mallat pyramid algorithm is shown as follows: xj1 (n) =
k

1 dn

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g0 (n 2k)xj (k) +
k

g1 (n 2k)dj (k) (5)

where 1 g0 (k) = 2 t ( ) (t k)dt 2 (6)

Fig. 4.

Equivalent Reconstruction Process

III. PALB M ECHANISM In this section, we propose the prediction based adaptive load balancing mechanism for ad hoc networks. A. Overview A functional block diagram of PALB is shown in Figure 5. Data packets rst enter into packet ltering model whose objective is facilitate trafc shifting among multiple paths in a way that reduces the possibility that packets arrive at the destination out of order. In PALB, a per-ow ltering method is used. The packet distribution model then distributes the trafc out from packet ltering model across the multiple paths. The distribution of trafc is based on load balancing model which decides when and how to shift trafc among the multiple paths. The load balancing model operates based on evaluation of paths stability and measurement of paths statistics. Because of the mobility of nodes in MANET, paths update time after time. If the paths update too frequently, the paths will be broken
Probe Pac kets

t 1 ( ) (t k)dt (7) g1 (k) = 2 2 The reconstruction process can be described as Figure 3. It is clearly that Figure 3 is equivalent to Figure 4. According to Figure 4, we can get time-series (x (0), x (1), ..., x (m)) and (dj (0), dj (1), ..., dj (m)), (j = 1, 2, ..., J) from the reconstruction of (xJ (0), xJ (1), ..., xJ (m/2J )) and j j j (d (0), d (1), ..., d (m/2j )), (j = 1, 2, ..., J), and it is obviously that x(n) = x (n) + d1 (n) + ... + dJ (n) (8)

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Reconstruction Process

Path Stability Evaluation

Load Balanc ing

Since the time series (x (0), x (1), ..., x (m)) and (dj (0), dj (1), ..., dj (m)), (j = 1, 2, ..., J) are reconstructed from the approximation and noise signal with smooth time-scale j, they are more smooth and stationary than the original time series. Thus some general prediction approaches

Data Pac kets

Data Pac kets

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Path N

Fig. 5.

PALB Functions

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before the convergence of load balancing algorithms. The load balancing is meaningless under such circumstance. Therefore we need path stability evaluation model to assess whether the paths are stable and consequently determine to perform load balancing or not. The path statistics measurement model is to obtain the multiple paths trafc load through sending probe packets. The load balancing model consists of three phases: balancing-off (when paths are unstable), balancing-on (when paths are stable) and imbalance detecting. In balancing-off phase, if the paths turn to be stable, it transits to balancing-on phase. In the balancing-on phase, the load balancing algorithm tries to equalize the congestion measures among multiple paths. The congestion measure of path is a function of path trafc load. Once the measures are equalized, the phase moves to imbalance detecting phase. In imbalance detecting phase, if it is detected that congestion measures are unequal, the phase returns balancing-on phase. In both balancing-on phase and imbalance detecting phase, if the paths turn to be unstable, it transits to the balancing-off phase. B. Path Stability Evaluation In PALB, let tc denote the convergence time of load balancing algorithm. We dene path stability as the probability of a path to maintain longer than tc . We use a statistical method based on previous paths lifetime observations to evaluate path stability. To specify the distribution of path lifetime, let f (x) x and F (x) = 0 f (u)du denote the probability density function and cumulative distribution function. Considering a path of age t, the probability to persist for a time span t0 is denoted as F (t, t0 ). F (t, t0 ) could be given by a conditional probability, F [x > t+t0 |x > t] = F [x > t + t0 ] = F [x > t]
f (x)dx t+t0 . f (x)dx t

In pratice, a threshold probability P0 is set, if F (t, tc ) > P0 , the path is assessed as stable, otherwise the path is assessed as unstable. C. Load Balancing We model a MANET by a set N of mobile nodes. It is shared by a set W of source-destination (SD) node pairs , indexed 1, 2, . . . , W . For each pair w = (i, j), we introduce Pw , a set of disjoint paths from i to j. For SD pair w, let rw be total trafc rate from i to j, and distribute xwp amount of it on path p of Pw such that xwp = rw ,
pPw

xwp 0,

for all

w, p.

(14)

Let us dene a vector xw with components xwp , p Pw , and let x = (xwp , p Pw , w W ) the vector of all rates. For any node n in the network, let xn denote the corresponding trafc arrival rate at that node. Thus xn =
wW pPw ,np

xwp .

(15)

Associated with each node n is a cost Dn (xn ) as a function of the trafc xn . We assume that, Dn (.) is dened on [0, ], is real valued, convex, and continuously differentiable. An example cost function is the average delay of an M/M/1 queue, Dn (xn ) = 1/(n xn ), where n representing the link capacity of node n. Our objective is to minimize the total cost D(x) = n n Dn (x ) by optimally splitting the trafcs on path p in Pw : min subject to
pPw

D(x) =
n

Dn (xn ) for all w w, p

(16) (17) (18)

(10)

xwp = rw , xwp 0,

But we cant directly use equation (10) to calculate F (t, t0 ), since the probability density function f (x) is hard to determine. Thus we modify equation (10) to a discrete form, F (k, k0 ) =
i=k+k0 Fi , i=k Fi

for all

(11)

in which k denotes the lifetime of path quantized by using a certain granularity and Fk denotes the probability that path lifetime is k. In practice, we record the number of paths in an array T which has a nite number of N elements. Element T [k] denotes the number of paths whose lifetime is k. Then Fk = and F (k, k0 ) =
N 1 i=k+k0 Fi . N 1 i=k Fi

T [k]
N 1 i=0

It can be proved that the rate vector xw is optimal if and only if, for each pair w and all paths p Pw with positive ows, D(x)/xwp are equal [14]. Thus D(x)/xwp can be used as congestion measure. We use gradient projection algorithm to resolve the above constrained optimization problem. It is iteratively adjusted the trafc on each path in opposite direction of the gradient and projected onto the feasible space of the constrained optimization problem. Node i could perform the update of xw (t) xw (t + 1) = [xw (t) D (x(t))]+ . xw (19)

T [i]

(12)

(13)

Here, is a positive step size, D/xw = (D/xwp , p Pw ) and [z]+ is the projection of vector z onto the feasible space. It is clearly, Dn (xn (t)) D (x(t)) = xwp xn np (20)

Although equation (13) could not give an accurate calculation of F (t, t0 ), we think a reasonable estimation of F (t, t0 ) can be still helpful to evaluate the path stability.

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If we could measure xn (t), in which n p, exactly at time t, we could compute xw (t + 1) exactly, then through several times iteration, the total cost D(x) is minimized and the trafc load is balanced. However it is not realistic. In practice, the SD pairs update their rates asynchronously and periodically in an uncoordinated manner. Moreover due to asynchronism and transfer delays in obtaining measurements, at time t, we could only get some xn (t ), where t < t, by packets probing. To resolve this problem, we use the predictor described in section II to forecast trafc of node n at time t. We dene a set Tw of times at which SD pair w adjusts its rates. At time t, t Tw , a prediction of xn (t), xn (t), is obtained. SD pair w then updates xw (t) to xw (t + 1): xw (t + 1) = [xw (t) w (t)]+ in which w (t) = D n ( (t)) x xn np (22) (21)

IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION To evaluate the effectiveness and performance of PALB, we make some simulations using ns-2 [17]. In our simulations, IEEE 802.11 standard [15] is used as the MAC and physical layer protocol. The nominal bit rate and radio range of radio interface are 2 Mb/s and 250m. We concentrate on two simulation scenarios. One is a stationary scenario with two source-destination pairs. Figure 6 shows the topology of stationary scenario. There are 6 nodes and 3 disjoint paths connecting node 1 to node 5, and one path connecting node 6 to node 2. The other is a mobile scenario with 30 mobile nodes in a rectangular eld, 1000m 1000m, and the mobility model uses the random waypoint model [16]. We run two simulations with speed 1m/s and 15m/s respectively, both with zero pause time. FTP connections are spread randomly over network. The number of connections is varied to change the trafc load in the network.
6
2

Through several times of iteration, the congestion measure can be equalized and the total cost of network will be minimized.
1

D. Trafc Measurement In this load balancing mechanism, it is required each node to record its trafc arrival rate periodically. The source node is required to send probe packets periodically along each disjoint path. Once a node receives a probe packet, it send a reply packet to the source node to report its current trafc rate. Since only the nodes in the multiple paths need to reply the probe packet, the overhead of trafc measurement is negligible. The source node collects the reply packets and records every nodes trafc rate in the sequence of time. Thus at the update time t Tw , source node could predict nodes trafc rate, xn (t), n p. E. Trafc Filtering The trafc ltering function distributes the trafc equally among N bins. The trafc from the N bins is then mapped into the disjoint path of Pw according to the load balancing algorithm. There are two ways to lter and distribute trafc into the N bins, packet-based lter and ow-based lter. The trafc ltering method would affect the TCP and UDP performance. When one TCP ow uses multiple paths simultaneously, the performance of TCP is decreases because of the out-of-order packet delivery via different paths, which will trigger duplicated ACKs, which in turn triggers TCP congestion control scheme. To avoid this problem, we use ow-based lter, based on <protocol, source address, source port, destination address, destination port> tuple, to ensure each TCP ow using only one path and multiple TCP ows can be transfered concurrently. As nowadays most application softwares support multiple TCP connections, we can get benet from this owbased lter without any modication to TCP protocol.
4

Fig. 6.

Network topology of stationary scenario

Figure 7 (a) and (b) show the simulation results of stationary scenario. At 10s, a 210kbps CBR connection starts from node 1 to node 5 and are distributed among 3 paths equally so that load balance is achieved. At 20s, a 100kbps CBR connection from node 6 to node 2 start, thus node 2 becomes heavy loaded, and the path (1,2,5) becomes congestion. We have an unbalanced situation with one heavily congested path and two lightly loaded paths. As shown in (a), PALB is able to successfully reduce the trafc from the overloaded path (1,2,5) and distribute them to the underutilized path (1,3,5) and (1,4,5). At 34s, the adjustment is completed and the nal trafc distribution converges to a steady state. The curve of end to end delay shows that network latency from node 1 to node 5 dropped from 4.7s to 3.8s when load balancing is completed. These results illustrate the convergence and stability of PALB algorithm. Figure 8 (a) and (b) show the average end-to-end packets delay of PALB in mobile scenario with speed 1m/s and 15m/s respectively and compare with MSR. Our simulation result shows that PALB achieves less end-to-end packet delay than MSR. The largest fall of end-to-end packet delay is up to 30%. The decreace of end-to-end packet delay is owed to load balancing which minimizes path congestion and in turn reduces the queuing delay at each node. Load balancing can also lead to energy consumption balancing. To evaluate the balance of energy consumption of PALB, we compare standard deviation of energy of PALB with MSR. Less standard deviation of energy means more balanced

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(a) load adjustment

(b) average delay simulation results of stationary scenario

network trafc. In order to forecast network trafc accurately, we analyze the characteristics of ad hoc network trafc and propose a wavelet analysis based trafc prediction method. By choosing a proper cost function for PALB, the end-toend packet delay, energy consumption, throughput and packets drop probability can be improved signicantly. Simulation results show that PALB mechanism is effective; end-to-end delay are decreased and energy consumption are balanced by applying PALB with multipath routing together. R EFERENCES
[1] Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/manetcharter.html [2] Audrey Zhou and Hossam Hassanein, Load-Balanced Wireless Ad Hoc Routing, Electrical and Computer Engineering Conference 2001, Vol.2, pp.1157-1161, May 2001 [3] Young-ki Hwang, HyungKeun Lee and Pramod K. Varshney, An Adaptive Routing Protocol for Ad-hoc Networks using Multiple Disjoint Paths, IEEE VTC 2001 Spring, vol.3, pp.2249-2253, May 2001 [4] Damla Turgut, Balancing Loads in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, International Conference on Telecommunications 2003, pp.490-495, March 2003 [5] Peter Pham and Sylvie Perreau, Multi-Path Routing Protocol with LoadBalancing Policy in Mobile Ad Hoc Network, International Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communications Network 2002, pp.48-52, September 2002 [6] Lei Wang, Yantai Shu, Miao Dong, Lianfang Zhang and Yang O.W.W, Adaptive multipath source routing in ad hoc networks, IEEE ICC 2001, vol.3, pp.867-871, June 2001 [7] Kui Wu and Janelle Harms, Load-Sensitive Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Computer Commnunications and Networks Conference 2001, pp.540-546, October 2001 [8] Asis Nasipuri and Samir R.Das, On-Demand Multipath Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Computer Communications and Networks Conference 1999, pp.64-70, October 1999 [9] Peter P.Pham and Sylvie Perreau, Performance analysis of reactive shortest path and multipath routing mechanism with load balanced, INFOCOM 2003, pp.251-259, vol.1, March 2003 [10] W. E. Leland and M. S. Taqqu, On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Trafc (extended version), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol.2, pp.1-15, Feb. 1994. [11] Stephane Mallat and Wen Liang Hwang, Singularity Detection and Processing with Wavelets IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol.38, No.2, March 1992 [12] C. E. Perkins and E. M. Royer, Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing, 2nd IEEE Workshops on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 1999. [13] The Linux Kernel Archives, http://www.kernel.org [14] Anwar Elwalid, Cheng Jin, Steven Low and Indra Widjaja, MATE: MPLS Adaptive Trafc Engineering, IEEE INFOCOM 2001, vol.3, pp.1300-1309, April 2001 [15] IEEE, Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specications, IEEE Std. 802.11-1997, 1997 [16] J.Broch et al., A Performance Comparison of Mulithop Wireless Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols, ACM MOBICOM98, pp.85-97, October 1998 [17] The Network Simulator - ns-2, http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/index.html

Fig. 7.

(a) speed 1m/s

(b) speed 15m/s

Fig. 8.

average end-to-end packets delay of mobile scenario

energy consumption while greater one means less balanced consumption. Figure 9 shows the comparis ons of standard deviation of energy. PALB shows less standard deviation of energy than MSR both speed 15m/s and 1m/s. In the best case, PALB achieves 30% - 40% lower standard deviation of energy than MSR. It proves that PALB leads to more balanced energy consumption, and consequently increases system lifetime. Comparing sub-gure (a) and (b) in gure 8 and 9, with speed 1m/s, PALB achieves better performance than 15m/s. This can be attributed to the fact that the paths are more stable with 1m/s than 15m/s. PALB is more effective with low mobility. V. C ONCLUSIONS To summarrize this paper, we propose a prediction based adaptive load balancing (PALB) mechanism for ad hoc network. PALB is a general framework which can cooperate with any kind of multipath source routing protocols. PALB can adaptively adjust the distribution of trafc among multiple disjoint paths based on the measurement and prediction of

(a) speed 1m/s

Fig. 9.

(b) speed 15m/s standard deviation of energy of mobile scenario

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