Politecnico di Milano

Advanced Network Technologies Laboratory

Exercises – Routing
 Question 1
 What is the difference between a proactive routing protocol and
a reactive routing protocol?
 Consider the following WSN scenarios and explain why you
would choose either a proactive or a reactive routing solution:
1. A WSN is used to monitor air pollution in a city where every
sensor reports its sensor data once every minute to a single
remote base station. Most sensors are mounted on lamp posts,
but some are also mounted on citybuses.
2. A WSN is used to measure humidity in a field, where low-power
sensors report measurements only when certain thresholds are
exceeded.
3. A WSN is used to detect the presence of vehicles, where each
sensor locally records the times of vehicle detection. These
records are delivered to the base station only when the sensor is
explicitly queried.
 Answer
 Scenario 1: A WSN is used to monitor air
pollution in a city where every sensor
reports its sensor data once every minute to
a single remote base station. Most sensors
are mounted on lamp posts, but some are
also mounted on city buses
 Most of the sensors are static, application
requires periodical traffic. I would choose a
proactive approach.
 Answer
 Scanario 2: A WSN is used to measure humidity in
a field, where low-power sensors report
measurements only when certain thresholds are
exceeded.
 It’s a event-driven communication paradigm, the
application does not seem to have real-time
requirements. I would choose a reactive approach.
 Answer
 Scenario 3: A WSN is used to detect the presence
of vehicles, where each sensor locally records the
times of vehicle detection. These records are
delivered to the base station only when the sensor
is explicitly queried.
 Communication is completely asynchronous. I
would choose a reactive approach.
 Exercise 2
 For the given network topology find the optimal routes from A
to M under the following criteria. The numbers X/Y aside each
link represent the latency and the energy budget to transmit a
single packet. The other number Z below each node is the
residual energy capacity.
 Minimum Number of hops
 Minimum Energy consumed per packet
 Shortest Latency
 Maximum Minimum Energy Capacity
 Solution
 Minimum Number of Hops
 It is easy to see that the path with minimum
number of hops is:
A-E-G-J-M
 The path has the following features:
 Total latency: 1+3+1+5=10
 Total Energy Consumption: 2+3+3+5=13
 Solution
 Minimum Energy Consumed per packet
 We have to find the shortest path on a graph
whose edges are weighted with the consumed
energy
5 1

1 2 2 2
2 3 3 5

1 1 1 1 2 1 2 1
 Short Digression on Shortest Paths
Given G(N,A) and two nodes i
and j, find the path with
minimum length
 The problem has polynomial
complexity in the number of nodes

Property:
If node k is traversed by the shortest
path from i to j, also the path from i to
k is the shortest
 Most Common Algorithms
 Bellman-Ford (basic)
 Assumptions: positive/negative weights
 Complexity: O(N3)
 Dijkstra (basic)
 Assumptions: only positive weights
 Complexity: O(N2)
 Dijkstra Algorithms
 Assumptions:
 Positive weighted edges
 Target:
 Find out the shortest paths from a source (1) and
all the other nodes
 Initialization:
P  1,
D1  0, D (j 0 )  d1 j j  1
 dij= if the edge i-j does not exist
 Dijkstra Algorithm
1. find i  (N-P) :
Di  min D j
j( N  P )

and set
P:  P  
i . If P  N , then STOP.
2. for each j  (N-P) neighbor of any node in P set :
 
D j  min D j , min Dk  d kj
kP

3. Go To 1.
 Dijkstra in practice
 Each node is assigned a label (n, L) where n is
the next hop on the path and L is the current
minimum path length
 At each algorithm step, each node neighboring
with any node in P updates its label looking at
its P-neighbors’ labels
 At each algorithm step, the node with the
lowest minimum path length is added to set P
 When all the nodes are in P shortest path tree
can be built
 Solution
(A, 10) (G, 7) (K, 3) (M, 2)
(D, 12) (G, 7) (K, 3) (M, 2)
(-, ) 5
(-, ) (-, ) (-, )
1
C (F, 7) D H K
(H, 5) (L, 3)
1 (F, 7) 2 2 (L, 3) 2
(G, 8) (H, 5)
(E, 9) (M, 5)
(-, ) (-, )
(E, 9) 2 3 3 (-, ) 5
(-, ) A E G J M (M, 0)

1 1 1 1 2 1
1 2

B F I L
(-, ) (-, ) (-, ) (-, )
(E, 8) (G, 6) (J, 4) (M, 1)
(J, 4)
 The min-energy route is: A-E-F-G-H-K-M
 Solution
 Shortest Latency: the solution is similar to
the previous case. The weights to be
considered in the shortest path calculation
change.

 The latency-optimal route is: A-E-G-J-L-M

 Solution
 Maximum Minimum Energy Capacity

 We can proceed as follows:

1. Sol=Null
2. Find a path, P, from A to M. S=P
3. Eliminate the node(s) (and incident links) with the
lowest energy budget
4. If, in the resulting graph, A and M are not
connected, return S, else go to 2
Solution

3 4 6 5

7 4 1

8 8 2 4
 Solution

 Alternative approach:
 Node G “must” be in the route
 Eliminate all the nodes which have lower
energy budget than G
 If a path between A and M exists, that’s the
one with maximum minimum energy capacity
 Exercise 3
 A WSN has a 5x5 grid topology. Nodes can
communicate only with neighboring nodes.
A packet transmission or forwarding costs 1
unit of energy (null consumption due to
processing and reception). Find the energy
optimal routes for both topologies.
 Solution
 Being the energy cost equal to 1, finding the
minimum energy tree is equivalent to
finding the min-hop shortest path tree
 Exercise 4
 Consider the following network topologies. What is the average and total load
in the network when the per-node load is calculated as the number of routes
each node has to service (including its own)
 What is the network lifetime of both topologies if:
 A node transmits in 1 second time frame its packet and all the packets it has received
from its neighbors in the previous second
 Each node has a energy budget of 100
 Each transmission costs 1
 Null reception and processing energy
 Solution
 The average per-node load can be obtained
by counting the traffic instances each node
manages.

 The total load is 68 and 112 respectively

 The average load is 2.8 and 4.6 respectively
 Solution
 The network lifetime can be calculated
looking at the bottleneck nodes

Time Time
Tx 1pkt 4pkt 8pkt 12pkt 12pkt ……. Tx 1pkt 2pkt 3pkt 5pkt 8pkt 12pkt 15pkt 17pkt…

Res 99 95 87 75 63 ……… Res 99 97 94 89 81 69 55 38….

Energy Energy

The two bottleneck nodes will die out during the 11-th second
 Exercise 5
Consider the WSN reported in the figure.
Suppose the WSN is operated by the RPL A
2 3
protocol. Links among nodes represent 1.2
reachability and numbers aside each link B C
represent the corresponding ETX 1 1 4
 Find a DODAG routed in A which is built D 3 E 1.5 F
with following objective function: “To
minimize the ETX along the established
paths”
 Find a tree routed in A built according to
the following routing objective function:
“To minimize the ETX along the
established paths under the constraints
that the minimum per-link ETX is lower
than 2”
 Solution
 Find a DODAG routed in A which is built with
following objective function: “To minimize the
cumulative ETX along the established paths”
A A
2 3 2 3
1.2 1.2
B C B C
1 1 4 1 1 4

D E F D 3 E 1.5 F
3 1.5
 Solution
 Find a tree routed in A built according to the
following routing objective function: “To minimize
the ETX along the established paths under the
constraints that the minimum per-link ETX is lower
than 2”
 All the links with ETX higher than 2 don’t have to be
considered for routing
The resulting graph is
A A already a tree
2 3 2
1.2 1.2
B C B C
1 1 4 1 1

D 3 E 1.5 F D E 1.5 F
 Exercise 6
 A routing protocol for WSNs leverages the
expected transmission count (ETX) as a routing
metric. To this end, two nodes, A and B, at the
vertices of a link probe the quality of the link
by sending out 100 [byte] probing packets
which are acknowledged (if correctly received)
through explicit ACKs of 10 [byte].
 Assuming that the Bit Error Rate (BER) is
p=0.005 in both directions, find out the ETX
measure for the link (assume independent
errors bit by bit)
 Solution

A B

 Since bits are independent, the probability

of correct reception of a packet of L bits is:
1-P= (1-p)L
 The packet error probability is: P= 1-(1-p)L = .98
 The ACK error probability is: Q=1-(1-p)Lack= .33
 Solution
 The ETX for the link is the average number
of packet retransmission (including the first
transmission) to let the packet go through.
 The transmission success probability can be
expressed as: P*=(1-P)(1-Q)
 Thus: ETX  P  2P (1  P )  3P (1  P )  ..
* * * * * 2

  (k  1) P (1  P )
* * k

k 0

 Therefore, the ETX is: 1/P*=74.6

 Exercise 7
 Under the same parameters as the previous
exercise, find out the expected transmission time
(ETT) for the previous link, that is, the average
amount of time taken by a transmission to go
through.
 Assume
 a link capacity (bidirectional) of 250 [kb/s] and null
processing time
 Propagation delay t=10 [us]
 After a failed transmission, the retransmission is
performed exactly after a round trip time
 Comment on similarities/differences, pros/cons of
ETX and ETT
 Solution

RTT

 The round trip time for a successful

transmission is:
 RTT=Tpacket+Tack+2t =3.2 [ms] + 0.32 [ms] + 0.02
[ms] = 3.54 [ms]
 The average transmission time can be
calculated as: RTT x ETX = 261.9 [ms]