Research on Wireless Multi-hop Networks: Current State and Challenges

Wireless multi-hop networks, in various forms and under various names, are being increasingly used in military and civilian applications. Studying connectivity and capacity of these networks is an important problem. The scaling behavior of connectivity and capacity when the network becomes sufficiently large is of particular interest. In this position paper, we briefly overview recent development and discuss research challenges and opportunities in the area, with a focus on the network connectivity.Comment: invited position paper to International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications, Hawaii, USA, 201

Trust Management for P2P application in Delay Tolerant Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. An Investigation into the development of a Trust Management Framework for Peer to Peer File Sharing Applications in Delay Tolerant Disconnected Mobile Ad-hoc Networks.

Security is essential to communication between entities in the internet. Delay tolerant and disconnected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) are a class of networks characterized by high end-to-end path latency and frequent end-to-end disconnections and are often termed as challenged networks. In these networks nodes are sparsely populated and without the existence of a central server, acquiring global information is difficult and impractical if not impossible and therefore traditional security schemes proposed for MANETs cannot be applied. This thesis reports trust management schemes for peer to peer (P2P) application in delay tolerant disconnected MANETs. Properties of a profile based file sharing application are analyzed and a framework for structured P2P overlay over delay tolerant disconnected MANETs is proposed. The framework is implemented and tested on J2ME based smart phones using Bluetooth communication protocol. A light weight Content Driven Data Propagation Protocol (CDDPP) for content based data delivery in MANETs is presented. The CDDPP implements a user profile based content driven P2P file sharing application in disconnected MANETs. The CDDPP protocol is further enhanced by proposing an adaptive opportunistic multihop content based routing protocol (ORP). ORP protocol considers the store-carry-forward paradigm for multi-hop packet delivery in delay tolerant MANETs and allows multi-casting to selected number of nodes. Performance of ORP is compared with a similar autonomous gossiping (A/G) protocol using simulations. This work also presents a framework for trust management based on dynamicity aware graph re-labelling system (DA-GRS) for trust management in mobile P2P applications. The DA-GRS uses a distributed algorithm to identify trustworthy nodes and generate trustable groups while isolating misleading or untrustworthy nodes. Several simulations in various environment settings show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in creating trust based communities. This work also extends the FIRE distributed trust model for MANET applications by incorporating witness based interactions for acquiring trust ratings. A witness graph building mechanism in FIRE+ is provided with several trust building policies to identify malicious nodes and detect collusive behaviour in nodes. This technique not only allows trust computation based on witness trust ratings but also provides protection against a collusion attack. Finally, M-trust, a light weight trust management scheme based on FIRE+ trust model is presented

IMPACT: Investigation of Mobile-user Patterns Across University Campuses using WLAN Trace Analysis

We conduct the most comprehensive study of WLAN traces to date. Measurements collected from four major university campuses are analyzed with the aim of developing fundamental understanding of realistic user behavior in wireless networks. Both individual user and inter-node (group) behaviors are investigated and two classes of metrics are devised to capture the underlying structure of such behaviors. For individual user behavior we observe distinct patterns in which most users are 'on' for a small fraction of the time, the number of access points visited is very small and the overall on-line user mobility is quite low. We clearly identify categories of heavy and light users. In general, users exhibit high degree of similarity over days and weeks. For group behavior, we define metrics for encounter patterns and friendship. Surprisingly, we find that a user, on average, encounters less than 6% of the network user population within a month, and that encounter and friendship relations are highly asymmetric. We establish that number of encounters follows a biPareto distribution, while friendship indexes follow an exponential distribution. We capture the encounter graph using a small world model, the characteristics of which reach steady state after only one day. We hope for our study to have a great impact on realistic modeling of network usage and mobility patterns in wireless networks.Comment: 16 pages, 31 figure

Not Always Sparse: Flooding Time in Partially Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we study mobile ad hoc wireless networks using the notion of evolving connectivity graphs. In such systems, the connectivity changes over time due to the intermittent contacts of mobile terminals. In particular, we are interested in studying the expected flooding time when full connectivity cannot be ensured at each point in time. Even in this case, due to finite contact times durations, connected components may appear in the connectivity graph. Hence, this represents the intermediate case between extreme cases of fully mobile ad hoc networks and fully static ad hoc networks. By using a generalization of edge-Markovian graphs, we extend the existing models based on sparse scenarios to this intermediate case and calculate the expected flooding time. We also propose bounds that have reduced computational complexity. Finally, numerical results validate our models

Parameterized Verification of Safety Properties in Ad Hoc Network Protocols

We summarize the main results proved in recent work on the parameterized verification of safety properties for ad hoc network protocols. We consider a model in which the communication topology of a network is represented as a graph. Nodes represent states of individual processes. Adjacent nodes represent single-hop neighbors. Processes are finite state automata that communicate via selective broadcast messages. Reception of a broadcast is restricted to single-hop neighbors. For this model we consider a decision problem that can be expressed as the verification of the existence of an initial topology in which the execution of the protocol can lead to a configuration with at least one node in a certain state. The decision problem is parametric both on the size and on the form of the communication topology of the initial configurations. We draw a complete picture of the decidability and complexity boundaries of this problem according to various assumptions on the possible topologies.Comment: In Proceedings PACO 2011, arXiv:1108.145

Bootstrapping opportunistic networks using social roles

Opportunistic routing protocols can enable message delivery in disconnected networks of mobile devices. To conserve energy in mobile environments, such routing protocols must minimise unnecessary message-forwarding. This paper presents an opportunistic routing protocol that leverages social role information. We compute node roles from a social network graph to identify nodes with similar contact relationships, and use these roles to determine routing decisions. By using pre-existing social network information, such as online social network friends, to determine roles, we show that our protocol can bootstrap a new opportunistic network without the delay incurred by encounter-history-based routing protocols such as SimbetTS. Simulations with four real-world datasets show improved performance over SimbetTS, with performance approaching Epidemic routing in some scenarios.Postprin

Self-organization of Nodes using Bio-Inspired Techniques for Achieving Small World Properties

In an autonomous wireless sensor network, self-organization of the nodes is essential to achieve network wide characteristics. We believe that connectivity in wireless autonomous networks can be increased and overall average path length can be reduced by using beamforming and bio-inspired algorithms. Recent works on the use of beamforming in wireless networks mostly assume the knowledge of the network in aggregation to either heterogeneous or hybrid deployment. We propose that without the global knowledge or the introduction of any special feature, the average path length can be reduced with the help of inspirations from the nature and simple interactions between neighboring nodes. Our algorithm also reduces the number of disconnected components within the network. Our results show that reduction in the average path length and the number of disconnected components can be achieved using very simple local rules and without the full network knowledge.Comment: Accepted to Joint workshop on complex networks and pervasive group communication (CCNet/PerGroup), in conjunction with IEEE Globecom 201