Mobility Study for Named Data Networking in Wireless Access Networks

Information centric networking (ICN) proposes to redesign the Internet by replacing its host-centric design with information-centric design. Communication among entities is established at the naming level, with the receiver side (referred to as the Consumer) acting as the driving force behind content delivery, by interacting with the network through Interest message transmissions. One of the proposed advantages for ICN is its support for mobility, by de-coupling applications from transport semantics. However, so far, little research has been conducted to understand the interaction between ICN and mobility of consuming and producing applications, in protocols purely based on information-centric principles, particularly in the case of NDN. In this paper, we present our findings on the mobility-based performance of Named Data Networking (NDN) in wireless access networks. Through simulations, we show that the current NDN architecture is not efficient in handling mobility and architectural enhancements needs to be done to fully support mobility of Consumers and Producers.Comment: to appear in IEEE ICC 201

Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Applying branching processes to delay-tolerant networks

Mobility models that have been used in the past to study delay tolerant networks (DTNs) have been either too complex to allow for deriving analytical expressions for performance measures, or have been too simplistic. In this paper we identify several classes of DTNs where the dynamics of the number of nodes that have a copy of some packet can be modeled as branching process with migration. Using recent results on such processes in a random environment, we obtain explicit formulae for the first two moments of the number of copies of a file that is propagated in the DTN, for quite general mobility models. Numerical examples illustrate our approach