A Research on Self-organizing Software Radio Network

Xiungquun Zheng, Wei Guo, Qingchun Ren

National Anti-interference Communication Technology Lab., University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China.

Abstrucf fn this article we make a research on the self-organizing software radio network. First, we introduce the key technologies, including the network control and management architecture, the routing protocols, the network-resource management and dynamic traffic equalization, and the technology of software radio serving as gateway. Secondly, we describe the unique set of challenging problems while designing the self-organizing software radio network, which differ from traditional wireless systems and wired networks. Finally, we present an approach to the further study of the self-organizing network. Keywords: software radio; self-organizing network; software radio networking * .software communication architecture (SCA)

network composed of a group of wireless mobile nodes, where there is no necessary infrastructure aiding its working. This type of network is very useful in emergency search and rescue operations, meetings or conventions in which persons wish to quickly share information, military communication of mobile tactical units, and data acquisition operation in inhospitable terrain. Now there have been so many papers focusing on software radio or self-organizing network separately, in this paper we try to combine them together. Taking the software radio as the node in the self-organizing network not only better draws out the compatibility, fail-safe nature, and flexibility of software radio, but also makes the network own a good ability to organize and reorganize, high anti-interference, invulnerability, and improves the different radio systems intercommunication, which acquires importance. External networking protocols define the communications between a SCA-compliant Radio System and its peer systems. These extemal-networking protocols can run over wireless physical media. Through the external networkin!: protocols, implemented by applications in a SCA-compliant radio system and its peer systems, a network of software radios is formed interconnected.

I. Introduction
In May 1992, Joe Mitola coined the term software in National Telesystems Conference of the U.S.A. The main idea of the software radio is to execute most of functions, on the condition that the system construction is universal and stable, to update and improve the system conveniently and cheaply, and to let the heterogeneous network interconnect easily and be compatible with each other, so accomplish the dream freeing the communication system from the hardwares enfetter since then. We should not only consider the important role the software radio plays when it acts as the gateway or bridge between different networks, but also take it into account that how the network runs while the software radio acts as the node in a network now. Both aspects have much business with the technologies of self-organizing software radio networking. Self-organizing network[,41 a multi-hop temporary is

I . Main Problems and Challenge I

There are several channels can be used at the same time for each node of the self-organizing software radio network, and the topology of network changes frequently, sometime this change can even influence the normal communication and reduce the invulnerability. So the key technologies, such as network management, routing, network-resource management and dynamic traffic equalization, the technology of software radio serving as gateway, must adapt to these so that the communication can go smoothly, and the network may possess the high anti-interference, invulnerability and inter-operation.

* Corresponding author, Email:zxqcy99@sina.com

0-7803-7547-51021517.00 OZWZ IEEE

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A. Network Management Architectures

Based upon the information collection and communication strategy, there are three types of network control and management architecture: centralized, distributed, and hierarchical[]. In a centralized network management system, there is a single manager station that collects information from all nodes, controls the entire traffic flow of the network and administers on the selection of routing. It is an easy implementation that has some potential problems, however. For example, when the network is large-scale, the overhead of the information collection becomes too much. Fmhermore, the whole network will be out of control when the singer manager station fails. A distributed management system has multiple manager station; each manages its subnetwork and communicates with other manager stations in a peer-to-peer manner. Using the distributed approach, a network management system could achieve higher reliability and efficiency as well as lower overhead both on communication and computation resources. Hierarchical network management system uses some intermediate managers to distribute the manager tasks. Each intermediate manager has its domain; it collects and processes node information of its domain and passes the information to the upper level manager if necessary. It also distributes the messages from the upper level manager to nodes in its domain. There is no direct communication between intermediate managers.

developed, such as DSDf16, WRP[], STARA81, GSRc9],

FSR~~! HSR[], ZHLS[I~]

,etc.

In contrast to table-driven routing protocols, for on-demand routing protocols, all up-to-date routes are not maintained at every node; instead the routes are created as and when required. And it is not necessary to broadcast the routing information period, so network resource is saved for data transmission. But there is some disadvantages, for example, when a source wants to send to a destination and there is no routing information for the destination, it must invoke a route discovery mechanisms to find the path to this destination, so there must be a long delay for date transmission, but the delay is not receipted for real time service such as voice service. Many of this kind of routing protocols have been developed, such like AODfl], DSRL41, TORA[5],ABR[l6l, SsR[], CB@!Sl Lm[I91, Based on the logical topology of network, there are two types of routing protocols: plane and hierarchical routing protocol. In plane routing protocols, there is no special node, the flow is distributed in the whole network evenly, and routing protocol has good robust and no responsibility for tracing node moving. But it is poor at extending, so it is only suited for small-scale network. The cluster routing protocol, for composed by as many as possible clusters, is fit for large-scalar network well. At the same time, we must notice that the failsafe nature and stability of cluster head of each cluster effects the function of the whole net heavily, and in order to permit node roaming, there is some other tradeoff used for mobile management. This type of routing protocols has been developed, as CGSR[201, CEDAR21,ZRF[221. The routing protocols discussed above, however, build and rely on single route for each data session. But the instability of the topology in these types of networks, due to node mobility, makes transmission of time-sensitive information a challenging problem. To combat this inherent unreliability of these network, there are some multi-path routing appeared recently, such as AODV-BRz31, SMR[241, MST[].

B. Routing Protocols
According to the route discovery strategy, the routing protocols, fitting for the specialties of self-organizing software radio network, can be divided into two categories: table-driven and on-demand routing. For table-driven routing protocols, each node maintains one or more tables containing routing information, which is updated period, to every other node in the network. Therefore, the delay is short when the route to destination is existed, but there is a large tradeoff for routing to stick with the latest topology change. We know that the topology changes so often in the self-organizing software radio network that the routing algorithm become not convergent in a long time, which limits its application strongly. Many this type of routing protocols have been

C. Network Resource S h a r i n g and Dynamic L o a d Balancing For each node in the self-organizing software radio

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.. .

network, there are several channels that can be used at the same time to transmission, and most of the functions are carried out by the software. So it has more sharing ability, failsafe nature and fault tolerance than traditional terminal. On the other hand, the distribution of.the traffic flow and network source is more likely to be uneven, this will consequently reduce the network capacity and the utilization. The kernel technology of the network management for self-organization software radio network should be engaged in obtaining the ability to manage and reconstmct the network dynamically and optimally, and arrive at some service quality; When the flow is uneven, or the channel state fluctuates caused by the signal fading and other interference, it can redistribute the resources of node and channel nimbly and in time, so as to make full use of them, reduce the chance of jamming, enhance the network's invulnerability and adaptability. But all these ability can be gained assuring some service quality.

the three models described above, or their combination depending on the network scale. Our concrete idea is that, when the network compatibility is not large, such as less than ten nodes, we suggest to using the centralized network management architecture, adversely, using the distributed architecture or the combination of the centralized and distributed architecture, so that we can set

up the eficiency and stable network management, which uses communication and computation resources as little as possible. In this network management architecture, each manager station only manages the construction, security, failure and performance in its domain, and can communicate with other manager station in a peer-to-peer manner. We can see that the whole network's management is completed through these manager stations corporately, and the network have the high failsafe nature, invulnerability and anti-inference.
Appl icationl Netwrk mangement. simple messege.etc TCP/UDP Transport IP (I~tRIP/OSPF)/(U;SRtCBRP). etc ~ ~ t ~ ~ k I ink

D. Gateway Technology Software r a i o can act as not only the wireless bridge,
but also the mobile router to interconnect heterogeneous radio netyorks,-through conversing different protocols. As the software radio accomplishes most of the functions through software, it is very easy for it to using miscellaneous types of mode and protocols, and even to imprbve the failsafe nature and fault tolerance. The major work is to study the method of controlling the flow, addressing, dividing and reassembling the basic data cell across network, and designing border gateway protocol.

I n s e . RJ45/RS232/
US422

Radio

Fig.1 protocol architecture for self-organizing software radio

network

C. Routing
Using the combination of the table-driven and on-demand route is the trend now, and which type of routing protocol to select relates to the logic topology of network closely. So we also hope to associate the routing protocol with the network management architecture while designing the self-organizing software radio network. The specific idea is to use the combination of the table-driven and on-demand routing protocol, exploiting the cluster architecture at the same time while the network is large-scale. Here we divide the whole network into several clusters following some rule. So that we can limit the range of period propaganda, and reduce the tradeoff on finding route, even the delay for on-demand route protocol has been shortened as possible.

III. Description of Our Research

Through studying the protocols on hand, we make some researches further, and get something as following:

A. Protocol Architecture
Reference the OS1 standard model, our protocol architecture including physical layer, data !ink layer, network layer, transportation layer and application layer. Each layer has independent functions and interface (c.f. Fig.1). Here, MAC sub-layer, LLC layer and network layer is our major work.

B. Network Management
The network management architecture may be one of

D. Network Resource Management

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The channels of each software radio can be used independently or corporately in according to the actual requirement. We know that different modulation and frequency has different communication distance, this results in the different connected graph of the network on each modulation and frequency, thus the total network appears to be composed of multitier dynamic topology and each tier ties up with each other (c.f. Fig.2). Based on the traffic of each channel, including the source service and relay service, we hope to conduct resource dispensation and traffic control between the tiers by some unitarian supervisory control program using dynamic resource management algorithm and routing algorithm. Our aim is to avoid some channels or nodes is too busy to deal with other more services, however some other channels and nodes are idle, to improve the system capacity. And when some channel has something wrong, we can even use the other idle channel to take communication in time to reduce the delay of data transmission as possible and realize the reorganization of the radio network.

damaged and the indicator will decrease consequently. We can redo the optimization using the backup and survival resources at this time or periodically, or when the service quality reduce to a level set at before.

E. Gateway Technology
Now, many researches focus on the networking protocol and routing protocol, but there is still a challenge for the interconnect of the self-organization network and fixed network, especially based on the IP protocol. It is a key problem how to routing the IP packets to the mobile nodes as the interconnection topology of the self-organizing software network and fixed network changes timely. The nodes is to find out a new way to complete location updating and routing discovery, which can send a IP packet to a mobile node successfully. The method to conduct effective mobility management is to make the registration localization using tiered network architecture, to keep the lower-tier mobility transparent to the upper-tier through the tiered registration.

I .Conclusion V
In this paper, we make some researches on the self-organizing software radio network, describe the main technologies, finally, and present a further study approach. At present, there are still many pinch points in this field , we plan to make our study following this way.

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