Network Formation and Routing for Multi-hop Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I would like to express my special and sincere gratitude to my dissertation advisor, Dr. George Riley, who has been constant in his valuable guidance and encouragement in my PhD research. I feel extremely lucky to be guided by his insight in research issues as well as great patience and care. Without his help, I could not have completed this dissertation successfully. I would also like to extend my appreciate to Dr. for reviewing this dissertation and serving on my PhD dissertation committee. Their comments and suggestions have helped improve the quality of this dissertation. I am grateful to my colleagues in the MANIACS Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology for their friendship, help, and support. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my parents, Renjun Zhang and ZiQiang Zhu, and my elder sister, Yun Zhang, whose love and encouragement have been continuously given me the braveness to face the challenges and finish my PhD successfully. Last but not lease, I am deeply thankful to my husband, Liang Cheng, for his love, support as well as precious discussions about my research. SUMMARY Wireless ad hoc networking is an important part of the next generation wireless network architecture. Based on the distance over which data is transmitted, wireless networks can be classified into wireless wide area networks (WWANs), wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs), wireless local area networks (WLANs), and wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) were originally designed to allow convenient interconnection of devices around an individual person or computer. Presently, the digital health care and wireless sensor networks are among the major applications. The first attempt to define a standard for WPANs dates back to Ericsson's Bluetooth project to enable communication between mobile phones using low–power and low–cost radio interfaces. Bluetooth is a promising short–range wireless communication technology with the characteristics of interference resilience and power efficiency both of which are desirable for wireless personal area networks or sensor networks. The new Intel Mote sensor devices have Bluetooth technology incorporated as the standard wireless communications interface. When using Bluetooth in applications where multi–hop routing is required, groups of Bluetooth piconets (one master and at most seven active slaves form a piconet) combine together to form a scatternet. However, most of the existing scatternet formation protocols are designed to facilitate communications between any two pairs of devices, regardless of the actual …