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Although various unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted routing protocols have been proposed for vehicular ad hoc networks, few studies have investigated load balancing algorithms to accommodate future traffic growth and deal with complex dynamic network environments simultaneously. In particular, owing to the extended coverage and clear line-of-sight relay link on a UAV relay node (URN), the possibility of a bottleneck link is high. To prevent problems caused by traffic congestion, we propose Q-learning based load balancing routing (Q-LBR) through a combination of three key techniques, namely, a low-overhead technique for estimating the network load through the queue status obtained from each ground vehicular node by the URN, a load balancing scheme based on Q-learning and a reward control function for rapid convergence of Q-learning. Through diverse simulations, we demonstrate that Q-LBR improves the packet delivery ratio, network utilization and latency by more than 8, 28 and 30%, respectively, compared to the existing protocol.

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Summary Recently, network traffic has become more complex and diverse because of the emergence of new applications and services. Therefore, the importance of application‐level traffic classification is increasing rapidly, and it has become a very popular research area. Although a lot of methods for traffic classification have been introduced in literature, they have some limitations to achieve an acceptable level of performance in real‐time application‐level traffic classification. In this paper, we propose a novel application‐level traffic classification method using payload size sequence signature. The proposed method generates unique payload size sequence signatures for each application using packet order, direction, and payload size of the first N packets in a flow and uses them to identify application traffic. The evaluation shows that this method can classify application traffic easily and quickly with high accuracy and completeness rates, over 99.93% and 93.45%, respectively. Furthermore, the method can classify each application traffic into its respective individual application. The evaluation shows that the method can classify all applications traffic, known and unknown (new) applications into their respective applications, and it can classify applications traffic that use the same application protocol or are encrypted into each other.

The time synchronization protocol is indispensable in various applications of wireless sensor networks, such as scheduling, monitoring, and tracking. Numerous protocols and algorithms have been proposed in recent decades, and many of them provide micro-scale resolutions. However, designing and implementing a time synchronization protocol in a practical wireless network is very challenging compared to implementation in a wired network; this is because its performance can be deteriorated significantly by many factors, including hardware quality, message delay jitter, ambient environment, and network topology. In this study, we measure the performance of the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) and Gradient Time Synchronization Protocol (GTSP) in terms of practical network conditions, such as message delay jitter, synchronization period, network topology, and packet loss. This study provides insights into the operation and optimization of time synchronization protocols. In addition, the performance evaluation identifies that FTSP is highly affected by message delay jitter due to error accumulation over multi-hops. We demonstrate that the proposed extended version of the FTSP (E-FTSP) alleviates the effect of message delay jitter and enhances the overall performance of FTSP in terms of error, time, and other factors.

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In wireless sensor networks, the accurate estimation of distances between sensor nodes is essential. In addition to the distance information available for immediate neighbors within a sensing range, the distance estimation of two-hop neighbors can be exploited in various wireless sensor network applications such as sensor localization, robust data transfer against hidden terminals, and geographic greedy routing. In this article, we propose a two-hop distance estimation method, which first obtains the region in which the two-hop neighbor nodes possibly exist and then takes the average of the distances to the points in that region. The improvement in the estimation accuracy achieved by the proposed method is analyzed in comparison with a simple summation method that adds two single-hop distances as an estimate of a two-hop distance. Numerical simulation results show that in comparison with other existing distance estimation methods, the proposed method significantly reduces the distance estimation error over a wide range of node densities.

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