Wireless community networks

An open standard IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networking technology provides an inexpensive and easy way to share bandwidth among multiple users. Such technology makes it possible to implement ad hoc wireless community networks using fixed wireless nodes rather than conventional base. A rural ad hoc network forwards packets from one wireless node to another to route data to a limited number of Internet gateways. A wireless community network uses two types of links between nodes. Point-to-multipoint links use omnidirectional antennas, while point-to-point links employ unidirectional antennas.     

无线网络环境下的缓存策略研究

日益普及的无线网络和移动设备为普适的Internet接入提供了良好的硬件基础,缓存技术是普适Internet场景中人们进行信息共享和分发的关键技术之一.综述了两类无线网络环境,即基于基础设施无线网络环境和移动自组网中的缓存策略,具体包括缓存放置策略、缓存替换策略、缓存一致性维护算法.进而分析、讨论了上述策略的优缺点,并指出了缓存策略的发展趋势.     

Cost-effective mobile ad hoc networks management

As there are more and more mobile devices in use, different mobile networking models such as ad hoc or mesh are attracting a large research interest. Self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) allow devices to share their services and resources without any central administration or Internet support. In this respect they can become the backbone of the wireless grid or the gateway to existing grids. To achieve these goals, MANET management must be as effective as that of wired networks. This is, however, a challenging task due to network features like mobility, heterogeneity, limited resources of hosts and feeble communication. This paper presents a set of simple, cost-effective and resilient procedures for the basic tasks of MANET creation and management.     

Dynamic address autoconfiguration in hybrid ad hoc networks

The use of ad hoc networking technologies is emerging as a viable and cost-effective solution to extend the range of traditional wireless local area networks (WLANs). In these networks, mobile client traffic reaches the access points through multi-hop wireless paths that are established by using an ad hoc routing protocol. However, several technical challenges have to be faced in order to construct such an extended WLAN. For instance, traditional autoconfiguration protocols commonly used in infrastructure-based WLANs, such as DHCP or Zeroconf, are not directly applicable in multi-hop wireless networks. To address this problem, in this paper we propose extensions to DHCP to enable the dynamic allocation of globally routable IPv4 addresses to mobile stations in hybrid ad hoc networks, which transparently integrate conventional wired technologies with wireless ad hoc networking technologies. Some of the attractive features of our solution are its ability to cope with node mobility, the introduction of negligible protocol overheads, and the use of legacy DHCP servers. We have implemented a prototype of our scheme, and tested its functionalities considering various topology layouts, network loads and mobility conditions. The experimental results show that our solution ensures short address configuration delays and low protocol overheads.     

Standardisation advancements in the area of routing for mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-organized and fully distributed networks that rely on the collaboration of participating devices to route data from source to destination. The MANET paradigm is expected to enable ubiquitous mobile communication and thus the proliferation of pervasive applications. The MANET Working Group (WG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is responsible for standardizing an appropriate Internet Protocol (IP) based routing protocol functionality for both static (mesh) and dynamic (mobile) wireless ad hoc network topologies. In this paper, we provide a background on the possibility to use MANETs for enabling future pervasive internet and innovative ubiquitous services. We also describe the work achieved by the MANET WG thus far on the area of secure unicast and multicast routing for MANETs. We also examine non-IETF work on this area, chiefly based on adaptive and hybrid routing. The paper then presents comparative performance evaluations of discussed routing protocols. It is mainly observed that there is a need for adaptive hybrid routing approaches in order to support future innovative and pervasive applications. Consequently, we present our conclusions.     

Cross-layer routing for peer database querying over mobile ad hoc networks

The widespread of mobile ad hoc networking calls for a careful design of network functions in order to meet the application requirements and economize on the limited resources. In this paper we address the problem of distributing query messages among peers in mobile ad hoc networks. We assume that peers are organized in classes. Each peer possesses a local database and can answer queries posed by other peers. Each peer can also pose queries to all the peers belonging to a certain class or classes. Contrary to traditional p2p lookup queries, we are interested in collecting answers from as many peers as possible. We propose a query routing protocol, called CL-QF, which is based on a novel cross-layer design. The purpose of this design is to incorporate application layer specifics (e.g., class information) into the network layer in order to reduce transmissions therefore economize on resources. CL-QF coexists with traditional routing. This synergy minimizes the complexity and signaling of CL-QF while the network is able to seamlessly provide legacy unicast communication. CL-QF manages a reduction of up to ～78% compared to non-cross-layer approaches, such as probabilistic forwarding, without compromising the ability to effectively collect replies.     

Understanding link quality in 802.11 mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc wireless networks will extend the Internet into new territory, making Web services available "anytime, anywhere." This creates new markets in such areas as pervasive computing and traffic management. We show that the communication quality of current 802.11 ad hoc networks is low, and that users can experience strong fluctuations in link quality as a result. They identify key factors that cause these fluctuations and derive implications for application development. In particular, applications must tolerate frequent disconnections, network partitioning, and latency variations that are far more severe than in conventional networks.     

Ad hoc无线网络中的组播路由协议

由固定网络、基础结构移动网络和非基础结构无线网络组成的集成网络将成为未来互联网发展的趋势。同时,面向组计算和组通信的需求不断增长,要求未来的集成网络能为用户提供组播通信的功能。Adhoc无线网络是非基础结构无线网络的典型代表,具有带宽有限、拓扑结构易变和电池能源有限的特点,这些特性使得未来集成网络实现组播通信具有一定的挑战性。该文在分析Adhoc无线网络基本特性的基础上,综合评述了新近的Adhoc网络组播路由协议的研究现状,并对几种典型的Adhoc网络组播路由协议的特点进行了分类分析和比较,最后讨论了Adhoc无线网络组播路由协议的发展趋势和挑战。     

Adaptive two-way uniform partition for multicast routing problem with separate paths in ad hoc networks

Finding a near-optimal routing solution for multicast requests is a challenge for supporting different multicast applications including video and group communications over wireless ad hoc networks. A heuristic partitioning algorithm for solving the multicast routing problem with separate paths in ad hoc networks is presented. We consider scheduling a set of multicast requests which may have a source node with multiple destinations respectively through a wireless network. Our heuristic method for partitioning arbitrary routing requests is both effective in finding a near-optimal solution, and efficient to solve large multicast requests. Our simulation shows that the average overall latency reduces up to 38%. We also find that the handling scales up well from 8 nodes to 64 nodes.     

一种跨层移动自组网络安全路由协议

网络层安全是移动自组网安全的一个基本方面。过去,人们对移动自组网网络层安全的研究主要集中在使用密码体制来保护路由消息的真实性和完整性上。但是,密码学体制所带来的额外资源开销和延时比较大。因此,移动自组网需要一种轻权的网路层安全机制。本文提出了一种基于跨层的移动自组网安全路由协议,利用跨层信息来提高网络层的安全性。模拟实验表明,我们所提出的安全路由协议是有效的。     

Secure communications for cluster-based ad hoc networks using node identities

Ad hoc networks are self-configurable networks with dynamic topologies. All involved nodes in the network share the responsibility for routing, access, and communications. The mobile ad hoc network can be considered as a short-lived collection of mobile nodes communicating with each other. Such networks are more vulnerable to security threats than traditional wireless networks because of the absence of the fixed infrastructure. For providing secure communications in such networks, lots of mechanisms have been proposed since the early 1990s, which also have to deal with the limitations of the mobile ad hoc networks, including high power saving and low bandwidth. Besides, public key infrastructure (PKI) is a well-known method for providing confidential communications in mobile ad hoc networks. In 2004, Varadharajan et al. proposed a secure communication scheme for cluster-based ad hoc networks based on PKI. Since the computation overheads of the PKI cryptosystem are heavy for each involved communicating node in the cluster, we propose an ID-based version for providing secure communications in ad hoc networks. Without adopting PKI cryptosystems, computation overheads of involved nodes in our scheme can be reduced by 25% at least.     

HyMN-injection-based multimedia content distribution in hybrid wireless networks

Infrastructured networks typically employ centralized approaches for group management and information provisioning. In contrast to that, in multi-hop ad hoc networks each node acts as a router as well as sender and receiver. In pure ad hoc networks, no Internet access is available. An additional challenge is to deal with mobility that causes network partitioning and re-organizations. Technically, these problems can be tackled by providing additional uplinks to a backbone network. Those can be used to access resources in the Internet as well as to inter-link multiple ad hoc network partitions, creating a hybrid wireless network. In this paper, we present HyMN, a prototypically implemented hybrid wireless network system optimized for multimedia content providing. Within the ad hoc network, adequate devices are elected to maintain uplinks to a backbone, which can provide for instance multimedia news from certain sports events like Football Championships, Olympic Games and alike. In order to efficiently manage the ad hoc communicating devices, a weighted clustering algorithm is employed. Based on an article presented at the 2nd ACM Workshop on Wireless Multimedia Networking and Performance Modeling, WMuNeP 2006, Torremolinos, Málaga, Spain, October 2006.     

移动自组织网络应用层组播研究

移动自组织网络的应用迫切要求组播支持。应用层组播是解决组播问题的一种有效的方案。针对目前移动自组网络中网络层组播出现的问题,深入研究了移动自组织网络应用层组播,并作了详尽的性能比较。深入分析了移动自组织网络覆盖组播的优势,并指出了移动自组织网络组播亟待解决的问题,为新的移动自组织网络应用层组播研究提供了非常有价值的研究方向。     

Cross-layer optimization for wireless multihop multicast networks

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is envisioned to tightly integrate the cyber-world of computation, communication, and control with the physical world. CPS is typically designed as a networked system of interacting sensors, actuators, and embedded computing devices to monitor and control the physical world. Thus, one of the essential building blocks of such a system is a highly efficient networking infrastructure. In this paper, we aims to develop an efficient wireless networking technology which can be utilized in CPS. More specifically, we develop a cross-layer optimization model based on the Network Utility Maximization (NUM) framework and its distributed solution for wireless multihop multicast networks exploiting multi-user diversity. It is known that the capacity of a wireless network can be increased by exploiting different channel conditions at different users, i.e., multi-user diversity; however, it is yet to be determined how much performance gain can be achieved by exploiting multi-user diversity in wireless multihop multicast networks. To address this problem, we extend the NUM framework and derive a new optimization problem including the benefits of multi-user diversity for multicasting scenarios in wireless multihop networks under a probabilistic media access control (MAC). In our problem, multi-user diversity is achieved via opportunistic scheduling. Then, we propose a distributed approximation algorithm for the problem. Our numerical results confirm that the benefit of multi-user diversity is prominent in a wireless multihop network with multicast flows.     

A global security architecture for operated hybrid WLAN mesh networks

Hybrid Wireless Mesh Network (HWMN) is a new wireless networking paradigm. Unlike traditional wireless networks, in HWMNs, hosts may rely on each other to keep the network connected. Operators and wireless internet service providers are choosing HWMNs to offer Internet connectivity, as it allows fast, easy and affordable network deployments. One main challenge in design of these networks is their vulnerability to security attacks. In this paper, we investigate the main security issues focusing on the most vulnerable part of the hybrid WLAN mesh infrastructure which concerns the ad hoc network part. Through our proposed architecture, Security Architecture for Operator’s Hybrid WLAN Mesh Network (SATHAME), we identify the new challenges and opportunities posed by this emerging networking environment and explore approaches to secure users, data and communications. From the analysis of strengths and weaknesses of secured routing protocols, we designed a new robust routing structure called MacroGraph (MG). MG structure is extracted from the mesh ad hoc network for each communication to be established between a source and a destination. Especially, MG is a robust structure based on node-disjoint path routing scheme and dynamic trust management that can be adapted to respond to applications’ security requirements. We present a performance analysis of our efficient, robust and scalable multipath reactive secured routing protocol. We investigate the behavior of our proposed scheme under two attack scenarios: Packet Dropping and Route Error attacks in dense network configurations.     

Mutual Anonymity for Mobile P2P Systems

Mobile peer-to-peer networks (MOPNETs) have become popular applications due to their ease of communication and resource sharing patterns in unfixed network infrastructures. As privacy and security are coming under increasing attention, many mobile and ad hoc network protocols attempt to provide mutual anonymity for users. Most existing anonymous designs, however, are path based, where the anonymous communications are achieved via a predetermined path. Such a design suffers from unreliable delivery and high processing overheads and is not practical. We propose a scalable secret-sharing-based mutual anonymity protocol, termed PUZZLE, which enables anonymous query issuance and file delivery for MOPNETs in ad hoc environments by employing Shamir's secret sharing scheme. We present the design of PUZZLE, analyze its degree of security and anonymity, and evaluate its performance by comprehensive trace-driven simulations. Experimental results show that compared with previous designs, PUZZLE achieves mutual anonymous communications with a lower cryptography processing overhead and higher degree of anonymity.     

Secure and efficient key management in mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, due to unreliable wireless media, host mobility and lack of infrastructure, providing secure communications is a big challenge. Usually, cryptographic techniques are used for secure communications in wired and wireless networks. Symmetric and asymmetric cryptography have their advantages and disadvantages. In fact, any cryptographic means is ineffective if its key management is weak. Key management is also a central aspect for security in mobile ad hoc networks. In mobile ad hoc networks, the computational load and complexity for key management are strongly subject to restriction by the node's available resources and the dynamic nature of network topology. We propose a secure and efficient key management (SEKM) framework for mobile ad hoc networks. SEKM builds a public key infrastructure (PKI) by applying a secret sharing scheme and using an underlying multi-cast server groups. We give detailed information on the formation and maintenance of the server groups. In SEKM, each server group creates a view of the certificate authority (CA) and provides certificate update service for all nodes, including the servers themselves. A ticket scheme is introduced for efficient certificate service. In addition, an efficient server group updating scheme is proposed. The performance of SEKM is evaluated through simulation.     

Providing scalable Web services using multicast communication

The recent growth in use of the World-Wide Web in the Internet has caused a significant increase in the demand placed on Web servers. This increased load results in noticeably longer response times for users. We propose an approach to using multicast in the delivery of Web resources that reduces the load on servers as well as the networks that connect them. We analyze the issues involved in using multicast in the Web, especially those related to routing and addressing, and present an alternative approach to multicast routing that is appropriate for this application. We also describe the design and implementation of a system based on the existing WWW client and server architecture and the multicast support provided within IP. Experimental results from this implementation are presented.     

Dawn of the Internet appliance

Internet technologies have fundamentally changed the way machines can gather, store and share information. Devices can now transmit important information and instructions via the Internet. Now the standardization of Internet protocols and competition among Internet service providers (ISPs) have driven down the price of Internet connectivity, so vendors are beginning to incorporate it into a wide range of devices. Developers can now put Internet connectivity into a variety of devices, including factory machinery, VCRs and hand-held appliances. In addition, low-cost communications technologies, such as wireless, promise to let users connect these devices inexpensively to intranets. Moreover, because Web browsers are so common, developers can provide sophisticated low-cost interfaces by supporting Web servers in their products. It is easy for developers to create such applications because they are so familiar with Internet tools