Several structured peer-to-peer networks have been created to solve the scalability problem of previous peer-to-peer systems such as Gnutella and Napster. These peer-to-peer networks which support distributed hash table functionality construct a sort of structured overlay network, which can cause a topology mismatch between the overlay and the underlying physical network. To solve this mismatch problem, we propose a topology-aware hierarchical overlay framework for DHTs. The hierarchical approach for the overlay is based on the concept that the underlying global Internet is also a hierarchical architecture, that is, a network of networks. This hierarchical approach for the overlay puts forth two benefits: finding data in a physically near place with a high probability, and smaller lookup time. Our hierarchical overlay framework is different from other hierarchical architecture systems in a sense that it provides a specific self-organizing grouping algorithm. Our additional optimization schemes complete the basic algorithm which constructs a hierarchical structure without any central control.

For the deployment of sensor networks, the sensor localization, which finds the position of sensor nodes, is very important. Most previous localization schemes generally use the GPS signal for the sensor localization. However, the GPS signal is unavailable when there is an obstacle between the sensor nodes and satellites. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new localization scheme which does not use the GPS signal. The proposed scheme localizes the sensors by using three mobile anchors. Because the three mobile anchors collaboratively move by themselves, it is self-localizable and can be adopted even when the sensors are randomly and sparsely deployed in the target field.

This paper presents an efficient time slot assignment algorithm for a wireless sensor and actor network (WSAN), which consists of stationary sensors for detecting events and mobile actors for performing tasks. TDMA protocols are suitable for WSAN due to time-critical tasks, which are assigned to actors. In order to improve the performance of TDMA protocol, a time slot assignment algorithm should generate not only efficient TDMA scheduling but also reduce periodic run-time overhead. The proposed algorithm offers O(δ2) run-time in the worst case, where δ is the maximum number of one-hop and two-hop neighbors in the network. The average run-time in simulation results is far less than O(δ2), however, while the maximum number of assigned slots is bounded by O(δ). In order to reduce the run-time further, we introduce two fundamental processes in the distributed slot assignment and design the algorithm to optimize these processes. We also present an analysis and verify it using ns-2 simulations. Although the algorithm requires time synchronization and prior knowledge of two-hop neighbors, simulation results show that it reduces the run-time significantly and has good scalability in dense networks.