A routing defense mechanism using evolutionary game theory for Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) often suffer from intermittent disruption due to factors such as mobility and energy. Though lots of routing algorithms in DTNs have been proposed in the last few years, the routing security problems have not attracted enough attention. DTNs are still facing the threats from different kinds of routing attacks. In this paper, a general purpose defense mechanism is proposed against various routing attacks on DTNs. The defense mechanism is based on the routing path information acquired from the forwarded messages and the acknowledgment (ACK), and it is suitable for different routing schemes. Evolutionary game theory is applied with the defense mechanism to analyze and facilitate the strategy changes of the nodes in the networks. Simulation results show that the proposed evolutionary game theory based defense scheme can achieve high average delivery ratio, low network overhead and low average transmission delay in various routing attack scenarios. By introducing the game theory, the networks can avoid being attacked and provide normal transmission service. The networks can reach evolutionary strategy stable (ESS) under special conditions after evolution. The initial parameters will affect the convergence speed and the final ESS, but the initial ratio of the nodes choosing different strategies can only affect the game process

Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications

Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection. In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m- Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes. This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments, called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile applications

Cooperative retransmission protocols in fading channels : issues, solutions and applications

Future wireless systems are expected to extensively rely on cooperation between terminals, mimicking MIMO scenarios when terminal dimensions limit implementation of multiple antenna technology. On this line, cooperative retransmission protocols are considered as particularly promising technology due to their opportunistic and flexible exploitation of both spatial and time diversity. In this dissertation, some of the major issues that hinder the practical implementation of this technology are identified and pertaining solutions are proposed and analyzed. Potentials of cooperative and cooperative retransmission protocols for a practical implementation of dynamic spectrum access paradigm are also recognized and investigated. Detailed contributions follow. While conventionally regarded as energy efficient communications paradigms, both cooperative and retransmission concepts increase circuitry energy and may lead to energy overconsumption as in, e.g., sensor networks. In this context, advantages of cooperative retransmission protocols are reexamined in this dissertation and their limitation for short transmission ranges observed. An optimization effort is provided for extending an energy- efficient applicability of these protocols. Underlying assumption of altruistic relaying has always been a major stumbling block for implementation of cooperative technologies. In this dissertation, provision is made to alleviate this assumption and opportunistic mechanisms are designed that incentivize relaying via a spectrum leasing approach. Mechanisms are provided for both cooperative and cooperative retransmission protocols, obtaining a meaningful upsurge of spectral efficiency for all involved nodes (source-destination link and the relays). It is further recognized in this dissertation that the proposed relaying-incentivizing schemes have an additional and certainly not less important application, that is in dynamic spectrum access for property-rights cognitive-radio implementation. Provided solutions avoid commons-model cognitive-radio strict sensing requirements and regulatory and taxonomy issues of a property-rights model

Socio-economic aware data forwarding in mobile sensing networks and systems

The vision for smart sustainable cities is one whereby urban sensing is core to optimising city operation which in turn improves citizen contentment. Wireless Sensor Networks are envisioned to become pervasive form of data collection and analysis for smart cities but deployment of millions of inter-connected sensors in a city can be cost-prohibitive. Given the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of sensor-rich mobile devices, Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Phones (WSN-MP) provide a highly flexible and ready-made wireless infrastructure for future smart cities. In a WSN-MP, mobile phones not only generate the sensing data but also relay the data using cellular communication or short range opportunistic communication. The largest challenge here is the efficient transmission of potentially huge volumes of sensor data over sometimes meagre or faulty communications networks in a cost-effective way. This thesis investigates distributed data forwarding schemes in three types of WSN-MP: WSN with mobile sinks (WSN-MS), WSN with mobile relays (WSN-HR) and Mobile Phone Sensing Systems (MPSS). For these dynamic WSN-MP, realistic models are established and distributed algorithms are developed for efficient network performance including data routing and forwarding, sensing rate control and and pricing. This thesis also considered realistic urban sensing issues such as economic incentivisation and demonstrates how social network and mobility awareness improves data transmission. Through simulations and real testbed experiments, it is shown that proposed algorithms perform better than state-of-the-art schemes.Open Acces

Measurement-based Admission Control for Real-Time Traffic in IEEE 802.16 Wireless Metropolitan Area Network

To support real-time applications, we present a Measurement-based Admission Control (MBAC) scheme with Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (M-LWDF) scheduling algorithm. The objective of the admission control scheme is to admit new real-time application call into the system without jeopardizing the maximum average packet delay bound. Measured values of the average packet delay from the network are used for the admission decision. As long as a new call can obtain the requested service and the packet delay of existing calls are not risked by admitting it, the new call will be accepted into the network. In addition, M-LWDF scheduling algorithm is introduced to efficiently allocate network resource. Simulation results show that the proposed MBAC scheme maintains good packet delay bound

Embedding Games

Large scale distributed computing infrastructures pose challenging resource management problems, which could be addressed by adopting one of two perspectives. On the one hand, the problem could be framed as a global optimization that aims to minimize some notion of system-wide (social) cost. On the other hand, the problem could be framed in a game-theoretic setting whereby rational, selfish users compete for a share of the resources so as to maximize their private utilities with little or no regard for system-wide objectives. This game-theoretic setting is particularly applicable to emerging cloud and grid environments, testbed platforms, and many networking applications. By adopting the first, global optimization perspective, this thesis presents NetEmbed: a framework, associated mechanisms, and implementations that enable the mapping of requested configurations to available infrastructure resources. By adopting the second, game-theoretic perspective, this thesis defines and establishes the premises of two resource acquisition mechanisms: Colocation Games and Trade and Cap. Colocation Games enable the modeling and analysis of the dynamics that result when rational, selfish parties interact in an attempt to minimize the individual costs they incur to secure shared resources necessary to support their application QoS or SLA requirements. Trade and Cap is a market-based scheduling and load-balancing mechanism that facilitates the trading of resources when users have a mixture of rigid and fluid jobs, and incentivizes users to behave in ways that result in better load-balancing of shared resources. In addition to developing their analytical underpinnings, this thesis establishes the viability of NetEmbed, Colocation Games, and Trade and Cap by presenting implementation blueprints and experimental results for many variants of these mechanisms. The results presented in this thesis pave the way for the development of economically-sound resource acquisition and management solutions in two emerging, and increasingly important settings. In pay-as-you-go settings, where pricing is based on usage, this thesis anticipates new service offerings that enable efficient marketplaces in the presence of non-cooperative, selfish agents. In settings where pricing is not a function of usage, this thesis anticipates the development of service offerings that enable trading of usage rights to maximize the utility of a shared infrastructure to its tenants