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University: University of Rochester
Professor:
Wendi Heinzelman 
Department: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

 

Title: UPS: Unified Protocol Stack for Emerging Wireless Networks

Many protocols in network communications are designed for a layered protocol stack that supports only a single protocol in each layer of the stack. The advantages of allowing different protocols to operate in concert in the same layer has generally been ignored due to complexity incurred and lack of stack architecture support. In this work, we propose a complete protocol stack framework called UPS (Unified Protocol Stack) as a solution for incorporating different protocols within the same stack layer for emerging wireless networks for which efficient networking is essential. With UPS, different protocols belonging to the same stack layer can be executed simultaneously as independent modules if the modules are implemented under the UPS unified protocol interface UPS-PI. UPS also includes an information-sharing interface, UPS-ISI, to allow centralized information storage and unified access methodology for all protocols, that makes UPS an ideal candidate for complex multi-functional communication networks.We simulate UPS using OPNET for wireless ad hoc networks where the general purpose TCP/IP protocols and AODV routing protocol are executed simultaneously.We show how UPS-enabledmultiple protocol execution improves the network performance, such as successful packet delivery ratio for the investigated scenario. We also built a wireless sensor network test-bed where UPS is implemented in TinyOS and installed to individual sensor motes. Physical experiment results show that instead of using a single routing protocol for all tasks, to run different routing protocols for different tasks can improve the network performancewhich can be achievedwith the proposed UPS framework.

 

 

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