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.     

Triangle-based routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Routing protocols for Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been studied extensively in the past decade. Routing protocols for MANETs can be broadly classified as reactive (on-demand), proactive, hybrid and position-based. Reactive routing protocols are attractive because a route between a source and a destination is established only when it is needed. Such protocols, unlike proactive protocols, do not have high overhead for route maintenance and are especially suitable for networks in which not all nodes communicate frequently. One problem with existing reactive routing protocols is the propagation of redundant route request messages during route discovery. In this paper, we present a low-overhead reactive routing protocol which reduces propagation of redundant route request messages. We also compare its performance with the well-known reactive routing protocol AODV.     

Optimizing communication in mobile ad hoc network clustering

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are gaining popularity in recent years due to their flexibility, the proliferation of smart computing devices, and developments in wireless communications. Clustering is an important research problem for MANETs because it enables efficient utilization of resources, and must strike a delicate balance between battery energy, mobility, node degree, etc. In this paper, we consider the typical communication workload of every mobile node as well as the additional communication workload of clusterheads in MANET clustering. We propose an algorithm that optimizes communication workload, power consumption, clusterhead lifetime, and node degree. Experiment results show that our clustering approach produces effectively balanced clusters over a diverse set of random scenarios.     

An evolutionary computation approach for designing mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents the topological design of ad hoc networks in terms of distances among static nodes and speeds of mobiles nodes. Due to the complexity of the problem and the number of parameters to be considered, a genetic algorithm combined with the simulation environment NS-2 is proposed to find the optimum solution. More specifically, NS-2 provides the fitness function guiding the genetic search. The proposed framework has been tested using a railway scenario in which several static and mobile nodes are interacting. Results show the feasibility of the proposed framework and illustrate the possibility of genetic approach for solving similar application scenarios.     

Improving routing distance for geographic multicast with Fermat points in mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), each node has the ability to transmit, receive, and route packets, and also moves through the field either randomly or in accordance with a pre-planned route. For enhancing the performance of MANETs, reducing the routing distance is a primary concern. For either ad hoc or static networks, the problem of minimizing the overall routing distance during multicasting is NP-complete. Therefore, it is difficult to determine an optimal solution. This paper presents an efficient geographic multicast protocol, designated as GMFP, based on the use of Fermat points. The objective of GMFP is to improve the overall routing distance for multicast tasks. Through a series of simulations, it is shown that GMFP outperforms the conventional Position-Based Multicast protocol and FERMA protocol in terms of the total routing distance, the packet transmission delay, the packet delivery ratio, and the node energy consumption. The performance improvements provided by GMFP are apparent as the scale of the network topology increases.     

无线自组网中一种高效的路由协议

无线自组网与传统的有线网不同,它由一些可移动的结点组成,这些结点的带宽、计算能力和能量都受到一定限制。针对这种网络,研究者们提出了按需路由协议,这些协议非常适合无线自组网这种拓扑结构,但是由于缺乏对全局拓扑和结点移动性的了解,可能达不到最优。因此提出了一种高效的路由协议ERNC,该协议基于已提出的SHORT路由协议[13],并对以前所提出的NAOR协议[14]进行了扩展,即利用网络编码技术来进一步提高路由协议的性能。最后,使用NS-2模拟器来评估ERNC的性能,结果显示ERNC在分组投递率和平均端到端时延等方面获得了比已有协议更好的性能。     

Improved group-based cooperative caching scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Data caching is a popular technique that improves data accessibility in wired or wireless networks. However, in mobile ad hoc networks, improvement in access latency and cache hit ratio may diminish because of the mobility and limited cache space of mobile hosts (MHs). In this paper, an improved cooperative caching scheme called group-based cooperative caching (GCC) is proposed to generalize and enhance the performance of most group-based caching schemes. GCC allows MHs and their neighbors to form a group, and exchange a bitmap data directory periodically used for proposed algorithms, such as the process of data discovery, and cache placement and replacement. The goal is to reduce the access latency of data requests and efficiently use available caching space among MH groups. Two optimization techniques are also developed for GCC to reduce computation and communication overheads. The first technique compresses the directories using an aggregate bitmap. The second employs multi-point relays to develop a forwarding node selection scheme to reduce the number of broadcast messages inside the group. Our simulation results show that the optimized GCC yields better results than existing cooperative caching schemes in terms of cache hit ratio, access latency, and average hop count.     

Adaptive TCP congestion control and routing schemes using cross-layer information for mobile ad hoc networks

Compared with traditional networks, ad hoc networks possess many unique characteristics. For example, ad hoc networks can drop a packet due to network events other than buffer overflow. Unfortunately, the current layered network architecture makes it impossible to pass the information specific to one layer to other layers. As a result, if a packet is lost due to reasons other than buffer overflow, TCP adversely invokes its congestion control procedure. Similarly, the routing algorithm may misinterpret that a path is broken and adversely invoke the route recovery procedure.This study addresses the limitations of the current layered network architecture by adopting a cross-layer protocol design for TCP and routing algorithms in ad hoc networks. The objective of this approach is to enable the lower-layered ad hoc network to detect and differentiate all possible network events, including disconnections, channel errors, buffer overflow, and link-layer contention, that may cause packet loss. Using the information exploited by lower layers, the upper layer-3 routing algorithm, and the layer-4 TCP can take various actions according to the types of network events. Simulation results demonstrate that the combination of the cross-layer optimized TCP and routing algorithms can effectively improve the performance of TCP and DSR, regardless of whether it is in a stationary or a mobile ad hoc network.     

A distributed fault identification protocol for wireless and mobile ad hoc networks

This paper considers the problem of self-diagnosis of wireless and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) using the comparison approach. In this approach, a network (MANET) consists of a collection of n   independent heterogeneous mobile or stationary hosts interconnected via wireless links, and it is assumed that at most σ$\sigma$ of these hosts are faulty. In order to diagnose the state of the MANET, tasks are assigned to pairs of hosts and the outcomes of these tasks are compared. The agreements and disagreements between the hosts are the basis for identifying the faulty ones. The comparison approach is believed to be one of the most practical fault identification approaches for diagnosing hard and soft faults. We develop a new distributed self-diagnosis protocol, called Dynamic-DSDP, for MANETs that identifies both hard and soft faults in a finite amount of time. The protocol is constructed on top of a reliable multi-hop architecture. Correctness and complexity proofs are provided and they show that our Dynamic-DSDP performs better, from a communication complexity viewpoint, than the existing protocols. We have also developed a simulator, that is scalable to a large number of nodes. Using the simulator, we carried out a simulation study to analyze the effectiveness of the self-diagnosis protocol and its performance with regards to the number of faulty hosts. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is an attractive and viable alternative or addition to present fault diagnosis techniques in MANET environments.     

Location aware, dependable multicast for mobile ad hoc networks

This paper introduces dynamic source multicast (DSM), a new protocol for multi-hop wireless (i.e., ad hoc) networks for the multicast of a data packet from a source node to a group of mobile nodes in the network. The protocol assumes that, through the use of positioning system devices, each node knows its own geographic location and the current (global) time, and it is able to efficiently spread these measures to all other nodes. When a packet is to be multicast, the source node first locally computes a snapshot of the complete network topology from the collected node measures. A Steiner (i.e., multicast) tree for the addressed multicast group is then computed locally based on the snapshot, rather than maintained in a distributed manner. The resulting Steiner tree is then optimally encoded by using its unique Pr

Full-size image

u" height="11" width="9">fer sequence and is included in the packet header as in, and extending the length of the header by no more than, the header of packets in source routing (unicast) techniques. We show that all the local computations are executed in polynomial time. More specifically, the time complexity of the local operation of finding a Steiner tree, and the encoding/decoding procedures of the related Prüfer sequence, is proven to be O(n²), where n is the number of nodes in the network. The protocol has been simulated in ad hoc networks with 30 and 60 nodes and with different multicast group sizes. We show that DSM delivers packets to all the nodes in a destination group in more than 90% of the cases. Furthermore, compared to flooding, DSM achieves improvements of up to 50% on multicast completion delay.     

A scalable publish/subscribe system for large mobile ad hoc networks

Since nodes that compose mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) does not have any prior knowledge about other nodes in many cases, the publish/subscribe communication paradigm that has the decoupling and asynchrony properties can be useful to share information between nodes. Existing publish/subscribe services for MANETs can be categorized into document flooding (DF), destination-based routing (DBR), and content-based routing (CBR). Although those approaches may work well when the size of network is small, all of them suffer from the performance decline as the size of the network increases. In this paper, we compare those approaches, and then propose a scalable publish/subscribe communication scheme in large MANETs by combining DF and CBR hierarchically. Our approach is to cluster all nodes in networks and to exploit CBR and DF for the intra- and inter-cluster communication, respectively. By using this approach, we can effectively utilize benefits of both approaches. Then, we present performance evaluation results which validate our idea with respect to system performance and scalability.     

Backup path set selection in ad hoc wireless network using link expiration time

Topological changes in mobile ad hoc networks frequently render routing paths unusable. Such recurrent path failures have detrimental effects on quality of service. A suitable technique for eliminating this problem is to use multiple backup paths between the source and the destination in the network. Most of the proposed on-demand routing protocols however, build and rely on single route for each data session. Whenever there is a link disconnection on the active route, the routing protocol must perform a path recovery process. This paper proposes an effective and efficient protocol for backup and disjoint path set in an ad hoc wireless network. This protocol converges into a highly reliable path set very fast with no message exchange overhead. The paths selection according to this algorithm is beneficial for mobile ad hoc networks, since it produces a set of backup paths with much higher reliability. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our algorithm in terms of route numbers in the path set and its reliability. In order to acquire link reliability estimates, we use link expiration time (LET) between each two nodes.In another experiment, we save the LET of entire links in the ad hoc network during a specific time period, then use them as a data base for predicting the probability of proper operation of links.Links reliability obtains from LET. Prediction is done by using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network which is trained with error back-propagation error algorithm. Experimental results show that the MLP net can be a good choice to predict the reliability of the links between the mobile nodes with more accuracy.     

Transmission scheduling algorithm for MIMO link ad hoc networks

Most reported works on transmission scheduling algorithm for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) link ad hoc networks do not fully exploit the spatial multiplexing potential inherent to multiple an-tennas system.In this paper,a novel transmission scheduling algorithm is proposed to further enhance the performance of MIMO link ad hoc networks.By utilizing the MIMO multi-stream reception capabilities and ordering the nodes’ allocation sequence,the proposed algorithm can dramatically shorten the scheduling frame length and more evenly distribute the data streams allocated to the network nodes.Meanwhile,allowing the nodes to transmit multiple streams in a slot,the algorithm can fully exploit the MIMO spatial multiplexing potential.Additionally,we give the theoretical analysis to quantify the throughput and delay performance with respect to this scheme.Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can efficiently enhance the network throughput and reduce the average and maximum delay.     

A cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture for wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, a novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture is proposed and presented. This cross-layer architecture introduces a new cooperative flooding scheme and two decentralized opportunistic cooperative forwarding mechanisms based on randomized coding, and a Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) protocol that enables cooperative forwarding, while incorporating physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers. RECOMAC employs randomized coding to realize cooperative diversity, so that relay selection and actuation mechanisms are alleviated and the MAC costs are reduced. The coded packets are routed in the network via the proposed cooperative forwarding schemes, which opportunistically form cooperative sets within a region, not needing a prior route to be established. Essentially, in the RECOMAC architecture, the routing layer functionality is submerged into the MAC layer to provide seamless cooperative communication, while the messaging overhead to set up routes, select and actuate relays is reduced. We evaluate the performance of RECOMAC in terms of network throughput, delay and MAC and routing overhead, in comparison to the conventional architecture based on the well-known IEEE 802.11 MAC and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocols. RECOMAC is shown to provide quite significant improvement by an order of magnitude difference in all investigated performance metrics, under a variety of scenarios, considering different network sizes, static and mobile scenarios and networks with multiple flows.     

Optimal opportunistic routing and network coding for bidirectional wireless flows

There is growing interest in recent years in routing methods for wireless networks that leverage the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and the ability of nodes to overhear their neighbors’ transmissions. Such methods include opportunistic routing (OR), which generally choose the next hop on a routing path only after the outcome of the previous transmission is known; and wireless network coding (NC), which linearly combines packets from different flows coexisting in the network. In this paper, we study the potential benefits of forwarding schemes that combine elements from both the OR and NC approaches, when traffic on a bidirectional unicast connection between two nodes is relayed by multiple common neighbors. We present a theoretically optimal scheme that provides a lower bound on the expected number of transmissions required to communicate a packet in both directions as a function of link error probabilities, and demonstrate that this bound can be up to 20% lower than with either OR or NC employed alone even in a small network. Using simulation, we further explore the control overhead in a direct implementation of the scheme with a simple coordination mechanism and show that the optimal bound can be closely approached for a wide range of link error rates.     

Virtual node based adaptive routing in wireless ad hoc networks

It is a challenge to make the routes quickly adapt to the changed network topology when nodes fail in a wireless ad hoc network. In this paper, we propose an adaptive routing protocol, which groups the network nodes into virtual nodes according to their data transfer capabilities and creates virtual-node-based routes. The protocol can accommodate the routes to node failures by adaptively pdating the virtual nodes and just-in-time using available nodes during data transmission. The simulations indicate that the proposed protocol can keep the routes failed-node-freewhen the available virtual node members cover the failed nodes scattering area.     

Opportunistic resource utilization networks—A new paradigm for specialized ad hoc networks

We present opportunistic resource utilization networks or oppnets, a novel paradigm of specialized ad hoc networks. We believe that applications can benefit from using specialized ad hoc networks that provide a natural basis for them, the basis more efficient and effective than what general-purpose ad hoc networks can offer. Oppnets constitute the subcategory of ad hoc networks where diverse systems, not employed originally as nodes of an oppnet, join it dynamically in order to perform certain tasks they have been called to participate in. Oppnets have a significant potential to improve a variety of applications, and to create new application niches. We categorize opportunistic networks currently known in the literature as class 1opportunistic networks that use opportunistically only communication resources, and class 2opportunistic networks or oppnets that use opportunistically all kinds of resources, including not only communication but also computation, sensing, actuation, storage, etc. After describing the oppnets and the basics of their operation, we discuss the Oppnet Virtual Machine (OVM)—a proposed standard implementation framework for oppnet applications. It is followed by a discussion of an example application scenario using the OVM primitives. Next, we discuss the design and operations of a small-scale oppnet, named MicroOppnet, originally developed as a proof of concept. MicroOppnet is now being extended to serve as a testbed for experimentation and pilot implementations of oppnet architectures and their components. We conclude with a summary and a list of some open issues for oppnets.     

Certification-based trust models in mobile ad hoc networks: A survey and taxonomy

A mobile ad hoc network is a wireless communication network which does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure or any centralized management. Securing the exchanges in such network is compulsory to guarantee a widespread development of services for this kind of networks. The deployment of any security policy requires the definition of a trust model that defines who trusts who and how. There is a host of research efforts in trust models framework to securing mobile ad hoc networks. The majority of well-known approaches is based on public-key certificates, and gave birth to miscellaneous trust models ranging from centralized models to web-of-trust and distributed certificate authorities. In this paper, we survey and classify the existing trust models that are based on public-key certificates proposed for mobile ad hoc networks, and then we discuss and compare them with respect to some relevant criteria. Also, we have developed analysis and comparison among trust models using stochastic Petri nets in order to measure the performance of each one with what relates to the certification service availability.     

Efficient implementations of all-to-all broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks

In order to ease the challenging task of information dissemination in a MANET, we employ a legend: a data structure passed around a network to share information with all the mobile nodes. Our motivating application of the legend is sharing location information. Previous research shows that a simplistic legend performs better than other location services in the literature. To realize the full potential of legend-based location services, we propose three methods for the legend to traverse a network and compare their performance in simulation. Two of our proposed methods are novel, and the third is an improvement on an existing method. We also evaluate several general improvements to the traversal methods, and describe our way of making the legend transmission reliable. The result is a simple, lightweight location service that makes efficient use of network resources. Beyond using the legend as a location service, we discuss several implementation aspects of providing an efficient all-to-all broadcast operation, including legend reliability, preventing duplicate legends, using a legend in dynamic networks, and working with non-synchronized clocks. We also provide pseudocode for our legend traversal methods to aid implementation.