A systematic approach to constructing families of incremental topology control algorithms using graph transformation

Abstract

In the communication system domain, constructing and maintaining network topologies via topology control algorithms is an important crosscutting research area. Network topologies are usually modeled using attributed graphs whose nodes and edges represent the network nodes and their interconnecting links. A key requirement of topology control algorithms is to fulfill certain consistency and optimization properties to ensure a high quality of service. Still, few attempts have been made to constructively integrate these properties into the development process of topology control algorithms. Furthermore, even though many topology control algorithms share substantial parts (such as structural patterns or tie-breaking strategies), few works constructively leverage these commonalities and differences of topology control algorithms systematically. In previous work, we addressed the constructive integration of consistency properties into the development process. We outlined a constructive, model-driven methodology for designing individual topology control algorithms. Valid and high-quality topologies are characterized using declarative graph constraints; topology control algorithms are specified using programmed graph transformation. We applied a well-known static analysis technique to refine a given topology control algorithm in a way that the resulting algorithm preserves the specified graph constraints. In this paper, we extend our constructive methodology by generalizing it to support the specification of families of topology control algorithms. To show the feasibility of our approach, we reengineering six existing topology control algorithms and develop e-kTC, a novel energy-efficient variant of the topology control algorithm kTC. Finally, we evaluate a subset of the specified topology control algorithms using a new tool integration of the graph transformation tool eMoflon and the Simonstrator network simulation framework