Slavik, Michael J.

A cross-layer design architecture featuring a new network
stack component called a controller is presented. The
controller takes system status information from the protocol
components and uses it to tune the behavior of the network
stack to a given performance objective. A controller design
strategy using a machine learning algorithm and a simulator
is proposed, implemented, and tested. Results show the
architecture and design strategy are capable of producing a
network stack that outperforms the existing protocol stack for
arbitrary performance objectives. The techniques presented
give network designers the flexibility to easily tune the
performance of their networks to suit their application. This
cognitive networking architecture has great potential for high
performance in future wireless networks.

This work presents the development of the Statistical Location-Assisted Broadcast (SLAB) protocol, a multi-hop wireless broadcast protocol designed for vehicular ad-hoc networking (VANET). Vehicular networking is an important emerging application of wireless communications. Data dissemination applications using VANET promote the ability for vehicles to share information with each other and the wide-area network with the goal of improving navigation, fuel consumption, public safety, and entertainment. A critical component of these data dissemination schemes is the multi-hop wireless broadcast protocol. Multi-hop broadcast protocols for these schemes must reliably deliver broadcast packets to vehicles in a geographically bounded region while consuming as little wireless bandwidth as possible. This work contains substantial research results related to development of multi-hop broadcast protocols for VANET, culminating in the design of SLAB. Many preliminary research and development efforts have been required to arrive at SLAB. First, a high-level wireless broadcast simulation tool called WiBDAT is developed. Next, a manual optimization procedure is proposed to create efficient threshold functions for statistical broadcast protocols. This procedure is then employed to design the Distribution-Adaptive Distance with Channel Quality (DADCQ) broadcast protocol, a preliminary cousin of SLAB. DADCQ is highly adaptive to node density, node spatial distribution pattern, and wireless channel quality in realistic VANET scenarios. However, the manual design process used to create DADCQ has a few deficiencies. In response to these problems, an automated design procedure is created that uses a black-box global optimization algorithm to search for efficient threshold functions that are evaluated using WiBDAT. SLAB is finally designed using this procedure.