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

Abstract

In this talk, we present results on integrating support for variability modeling into a correct-by-construction development methodology for topology control algorithms, as appeared online in the Software & Systems Modeling journal in 2017. A topology control algorithm reduces the size of the visible neighborhood of a node in a wireless communication network. At the same time, it must fulfill important consistency properties to ensure a high quality of service. In previous work, we proposed a constructive, model-driven methodology for designing individual topology control algorithms based on declarative graph constraints and graph transformation rules; the resulting algorithms are guaranteed to preserve the specified properties. Even though many topology control algorithms share substantial (structural) parts, few works leverage these commonalities at design time. In this work, we generalize our proposed construction methodology by modeling variability points to support the construction of families of algorithms. We show the applicability of our approach by reengineering six existing topology control algorithms and developing e-kTC, a novel energy-efficient variant of the topology control algorithm kTC. Finally, we evaluate a subset of the algorithms using a novel integration of a wireless network simulator and a graph transformation tool.