Performance of management solutions and cooperation approaches for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

A wide range of daily-life applications supported by vehicular networks attracted the interest, not only from the research community, but also from governments and the automotive industry. For example, they can be used to enable services that assist drivers on the roads (e.g., road safety, traffic monitoring), to spread commercial and entertainment contents (e.g., publicity), or to enable communications on remote or rural regions where it is not possible to have a common network infrastructure. Nonetheless, the unique properties of vehicular networks raise several challenges that greatly impact the deployment of these networks. Most of the challenges faced by vehicular networks arise from the highly dynamic network topology, which leads to short and sporadic contact opportunities, disruption, variable node density, and intermittent connectivity. This situation makes data dissemination an interesting research topic within the vehicular networking area, which is addressed by this study. The work described along this thesis is motivated by the need to propose new solutions to deal with data dissemination problems in vehicular networking focusing on vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs). To guarantee the success of data dissemination in vehicular networks scenarios it is important to ensure that network nodes cooperate with each other. However, it is not possible to ensure a fully cooperative scenario. This situation makes vehicular networks suitable to the presence of selfish and misbehavior nodes, which may result in a significant decrease of the overall network performance. Thus, cooperative nodes may suffer from the overwhelming load of services from other nodes, which comprises their performance. Trying to solve some of these problems, this thesis presents several proposals and studies on the impact of cooperation, monitoring, and management strategies on the network performance of the VDTN architecture. The main goal of these proposals is to enhance the network performance. In particular, cooperation and management approaches are exploited to improve and optimize the use of network resources. It is demonstrated the performance gains attainable in a VDTN through both types of approaches, not only in terms of bundle delivery probability, but also in terms of wasted resources. The results and achievements observed on this research work are intended to contribute to the advance of the state-of-the-art on methods and strategies for overcome the challenges that arise from the unique characteristics and conceptual design of vehicular networks.O vasto número de aplicações e cenários suportados pelas redes veiculares faz com que estas atraiam o interesse não só da comunidade científica, mas também dos governos e da indústria automóvel. A título de exemplo, estas podem ser usadas para a implementação de serviços e aplicações que podem ajudar os condutores dos veículos a tomar decisões nas estradas, para a disseminação de conteúdos publicitários, ou ainda, para permitir que existam comunicações em zonas rurais ou remotas onde não é possível ter uma infraestrutura de rede convencional. Contudo, as propriedades únicas das redes veiculares fazem com que seja necessário ultrapassar um conjunto de desafios que têm grande impacto na sua aplicabilidade. A maioria dos desafios que as redes veiculares enfrentam advêm da grande mobilidade dos veículos e da topologia de rede que está em constante mutação. Esta situação faz com que este tipo de rede seja suscetível de disrupção, que as oportunidades de contacto sejam escassas e de curta duração, e que a ligação seja intermitente. Fruto destas adversidades, a disseminação dos dados torna-se um tópico de investigação bastante promissor na área das redes veiculares e por esta mesma razão é abordada neste trabalho de investigação. O trabalho descrito nesta tese é motivado pela necessidade de propor novas abordagens para lidar com os problemas inerentes à disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares. Para garantir o sucesso da disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares é importante que este tipo de redes garanta a cooperação entre os nós da rede. Contudo, neste tipo de ambientes não é possível garantir um cenário totalmente cooperativo. Este cenário faz com que as redes veiculares sejam suscetíveis à presença de nós não cooperativos que comprometem seriamente o desempenho global da rede. Por outro lado, os nós cooperativos podem ver o seu desempenho comprometido por causa da sobrecarga de serviços que poderão suportar. Para tentar resolver alguns destes problemas, esta tese apresenta várias propostas e estudos sobre o impacto de estratégias de cooperação, monitorização e gestão de rede no desempenho das redes veiculares com ligações intermitentes (Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks - VDTNs). O objetivo das propostas apresentadas nesta tese é melhorar o desempenho global da rede. Em particular, as estratégias de cooperação e gestão de rede são exploradas para melhorar e optimizar o uso dos recursos da rede. Ficou demonstrado que o uso deste tipo de estratégias e metodologias contribui para um aumento significativo do desempenho da rede, não só em termos de agregados de pacotes (“bundles”) entregues, mas também na diminuição do volume de recursos desperdiçados. Os resultados observados neste trabalho procuram contribuir para o avanço do estado da arte em métodos e estratégias que visam ultrapassar alguns dos desafios que advêm das propriedades e desenho conceptual das redes veiculares

Performance evaluation of a cooperative reputation system for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

In the last decade, both scientific community and automotive industry enabled communications among vehicles in different kinds of scenarios proposing different vehicular architectures. Vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs) were proposed as a solution to overcome some of the issues found in other vehicular architectures, namely, in dispersed regions and emergency scenarios. Most of these issues arise from the unique characteristics of vehicular networks. Contrary to delay-tolerant networks (DTNs), VDTNs place the bundle layer under the network layer in order to simplify the layered architecture and enable communications in sparse regions characterized by long propagation delays, high error rates, and short contact durations. However, such characteristics turn contacts very important in order to exchange as much information as possible between nodes at every contact opportunity. One way to accomplish this goal is to enforce cooperation between network nodes. To promote cooperation among nodes, it is important that nodes share their own resources to deliver messages from others. This can be a very difficult task, if selfish nodes affect the performance of cooperative nodes. This paper studies the performance of a cooperative reputation system that detects, identify, and avoid communications with selfish nodes. Two scenarios were considered across all the experiments enforcing three different routing protocols (First Contact, Spray and Wait, and GeoSpray). For both scenarios, it was shown that reputation mechanisms that punish aggressively selfish nodes contribute to increase the overall network performance

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

Computational Intelligence Inspired Data Delivery for Vehicle-to-Roadside Communications

We propose a vehicle-to-roadside communication protocol based on distributed clustering where a coalitional game approach is used to stimulate the vehicles to join a cluster, and a fuzzy logic algorithm is employed to generate stable clusters by considering multiple metrics of vehicle velocity, moving pattern, and signal qualities between vehicles. A reinforcement learning algorithm with game theory based reward allocation is employed to guide each vehicle to select the route that can maximize the whole network performance. The protocol is integrated with a multi-hop data delivery virtualization scheme that works on the top of the transport layer and provides high performance for multi-hop end-to-end data transmissions. We conduct realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the protocol over other approaches

Erkennung und Vermeidung von Fehlverhalten in fahrzeugbasierten DTNs

Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are a suitable technology for many applications when the network suffers from intermittent connections and significant delays. In current vehicular networks, due to the high mobility of vehicles, the connectivity in vehicular networks can be highly unstable, links may change or break soon after they have been established and the network topology varies significantly depending on time and location. When the density of networked vehicles is low, connectivity is intermittent and with only a few transmission opportunities. This makes forwarding packets very difficult. For the next years, until a high penetration of networked vehicles is realized, delay-tolerant methods are a necessity in vehicular networks, leading to Vehicular DTNs (VDTNs). By implementing a store-carry-forward paradigm, VDTNs can make sure that even under difficult conditions, the network can be used by applications. However, we cannot assume that all vehicles are altruistic in VDTNs. Attackers can penetrate the communication systems of vehicles trying their best to destroy the network. Especially if multiple attackers collude to disrupt the network, the characteristics of VDTNs, without continuous connectivity, make most traditional strategies of detecting attackers infeasible. Additionally, selfish nodes may be reluctant to cooperate considering their profit, and due to hard- or software errors some vehicles cannot send or forward data. Hence, efficient mechanisms to detect malicious nodes in VDTNs are imperative. In this thesis, two classes of Misbehavior Detection Systems (MDSs) are proposed to defend VDTNs against malicious nodes. Both MDSs use encounter records (ERs) as proof to document nodes' behavior during previous contacts. By collecting and securely exchanging ERs, depending on different strategies in different classes of MDSs, a reputation system is built in order to punish bad behavior while encouraging cooperative behavior in the network. With independently operating nodes and asynchronous exchange of observations through ERs, both systems are very well suited for VDTNs, where there will be no continuous, ubiquitous network in the foreseeable future. By evaluating our methods through extensive simulations using different DTN routing protocols and different realistic scenarios, we find that both MDS classes are able to efficiently protect the system with low overhead and prevent malicious nodes from further disrupting the network.In Netzwerken mit zeitweisen Unterbrechungen oder langen Verzögerungen sind Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) eine geeignete Technologie für viele Anwendungen. Die Konnektivität in Fahrzeugnetzen ist bedingt durch die hohe Mobilität und die geringe Verbreitung von netzwerkfähigen Fahrzeugen oft instabil. Bis zur flächendeckenden Verbreitung von netzwerkfähigen Fahrzeugen ist es daher zwingend notwendig auf Methoden des Delay Tolerant Networking zurückzugreifen um die bestmögliche Kommunikation zu gewährleisten. In diesem Zusammenhang wird von Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs) gesprochen. Durch das Store-Carry-Forward-Prinzip kann ein VDTN Kommunikation für Anwendungen ermöglichen. Allerdings ist davon auszugehen, dass sich nicht alle Fahrzeuge altruistisch verhalten: Angreifer können Fahrzeuge übernehmen und das Netzwerk attackieren oder Knoten sind aus egoistischen Motiven oder auf Grund von Defekten unkooperativ. Verfahren, die Fehlverhalten in stabilen Netzen durch direkte Beobachtung erkennen können, sind in VDTNs nicht anwendbar. Daher sind Methoden, die Fehlverhalten in VDTNs nachweisen können, zwingend erforderlich. In dieser Arbeit werden zwei Klassen von Misbehavior Detection Systems (MDSs) vorgestellt. Beide Systeme basieren auf Encounter Records (ERs): Nach einem Kontakt tauschen zwei Knoten kryptografisch signierte Meta-Informationen zu den erfolgten Datentransfers aus. Diese ERs dienen bei darauffolgenden Kontakten mit anderen Netzwerkteilnehmern als vertrauenswürdiger Nachweis für das Verhalten eines Knotens in der Vergangenheit. Basierend auf der Auswertung gesammelter ERs wird ein Reputationssystem entwickelt, das kooperatives Verhalten belohnt und unkooperatives Verhalten bestraft. Dauerhaft unkooperative Knoten werden aus dem Netzwerk ausgeschlossen. Durch den asynchronen Austausch von Informationen kann jeder Knoten das Verhalten seiner Nachbarn selbstständig und unabhängig evaluieren. Dadurch sind die vorgestellten MDS-Varianten sehr gut für den Einsatz in einem VDTN geeignet. Durch umfangreiche Evaluationen wird gezeigt, dass sich die entwickelten MDS-Verfahren für verschiedene Routingprotokolle und in unterschiedlichen Szenarien anwenden lassen. In allen Fällen ist das MDS in der Lage das System mit geringem Overhead gegen Angreifer zu verteidigen und eine hohe Servicequalität im Netzwerk zu gewährleisten

CGT Method of Message forwarding

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), because of the nonexistence of end-to-end connections, it is essential that nodes take advantage of connection opportunities to forward messages to make end-to-end messaging possible. Thus, it is crucial to make sure that nodes have incentives to forward messages for others, despite the fact that the routing protocols in VANETs are different from traditional end-to-end routing protocols. In this paper, stimulation of message forwarding in VANETs is concerned. This approach is based on coalitional game theory, particularly, an incentive scheme for VANETs is proposed and with this scheme, following the routing protocol is in the best interest of each node. In addition, a lightweight approach is proposed for taking the limited storage space of each node into consideration