Geographic-Based Spray-and-Relay (GSaR): An Efficient Routing Scheme for DTNs

In this article, we design and evaluate the proposed Geographic-based Spray-and-Relay (GSaR) routing scheme in Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs). To the best of our knowledge, GSaR is the first spray based geographic routing scheme using the historical geographic information for making routing decision. Here, the term spray means only a limited number of message copies are allowed for replication in the network. By estimating a movement range of destination via the historical geographic information, GSaR expedites message being sprayed towards this range, meanwhile prevents that away from and postpones that out of this range. As such, the combination of them intends to fast and efficiently spray the limited number of message copies towards this range, and effectively spray them within range, in order to reduce the delivery delay and increase the delivery ratio. Furthermore, GSaR exploits Delegation Forwarding (DF) to enhance the reliability of routing decision and handle the local maximum problem, considered as the challenges for applying geographic routing scheme in sparse networks. We evaluate GSaR under three city scenarios abstracted from real world, with other routing schemes for comparison. Results show that GSaR is reliable for delivering messages before expiration deadline and efficient for achieving low routing overhead ratio. Further observation indicates that GSaR is also efficient in terms of a low and fair energy consumption over the nodes in the network

A Reliable and Efficient Encounter-Based Routing Framework for Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks

This article addresses Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing under a highly dynamic scenario, envisioned for communication in Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) suffering from intermittent connection. Here, we focus on the design of a high level routing framework, rather than the dedicated encounter prediction. Based on an analyzed utility metric to predict nodal encounter, our proposed routing framework considers the following three cases: 1) Messages are efficiently replicated to a better qualified candidate node, based on the analysed utility metric related to destination. 2) Messages are conditionally replicated if the node with a better utility metric has not been met. 3) Messages are probabilistically replicated if the information in relation to destination is unavailable in the worst case. With this framework in mind, we propose two routing schemes covering two major technique branches in literature, namely Encounter-Based Replication Routing (EBRR) and Encounter-Based Spraying Routing (EBSR). Results under the scenario applicable to VSNs show that, in addition to achieving high delivery ratio for reliability, our schemes are more efficient in terms of a lower overhead ratio. Our core investigation indicates that apart from what information to use for encounter prediction, how to deliver messages based on the given utility metric is also important

Message Forwarding and Scheduling in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) has recently received considerable attention from the research community. This type of networks is characterized by frequent disconnections due to propagation phenomena, node mobility, and power outages. Thus, the complete path between the source and the destination may never have existed. This context requires the design of new communication paradigms and techniques that will make communication possible in these environments. To achieve message delivery, researchers have proposed the use of store-carry-and-forward protocols, whereby a node may store the message and carry it until an appropriate forwarding opportunity arises. Many flooding-routing schemes have been proposed for DTNs in order to increase the probability of message delivery. However, these schemes suffer from excessive energy consumption, severe contention that significantly degrades their performance, especially if we account for the fact that each node could be a hand-held and battery-powered device with stringent buffer size limitation. With such buffer limitations at the DTN nodes, message drop/loss could happen due to buffer overflow. In order to address the problem and improve the performance of DTNs, this thesis focuses on two main design objectives; first, the design and evaluation of new multi-copy routing schemes; second, the design and evaluation of new scheduling and dropping policies to reduce message drop/loss due to buffer overflow. To fulfill the first objective, a protocol called Self Adaptive Routing Protocol (SARP) is introduced. It is a multi-copy scheme designed to suit resource-sufficient DTNs. Based on SARP, two multi-copy routing schemes are further developed to suit resource-limited DTNs, in which compensating the traffic demand become a challenge: i) the Self Adaptive Utility-based Routing Protocol (SAURP), ii) and the Adaptive Reinforcement based Routing Protocol (ARBRP). The introduced protocols form a new framework of DTNs aiming to significantly reduce the resource requirements of flooding-based routing schemes. Each introduced scheme has its own way of exploring the possibility of taking mobile nodes as message carriers in order to increase the delivery ratio of the messages. In SAURP, the best carrier for a message characterized by jointly considering the inter-contact time that is obtained using a novel contact model and the network status, such as including wireless link condition and nodal buffer availability. In ARBRP, the routing problem is solved by manipulating a collaborative reinforcement learning technique, where a group of nodes can cooperate with each other to make a forwarding decision for the stored messages based on a cost function at each contact with another node. ARBRP is characterized by not only considering the contact time statistics, but also looks into the feedback on user behavior and network conditions, such as congestion and buffer occupancy sampled during each previous contact with any other node. The thesis argues and proves that the nodal movement and the predicted collocation with the message recipient can serve as meaningful information to achieve an intelligent message forwarding decision at each node. Therefore, the introduced protocols can achieve high efficiency via an adaptive and intelligent routing mechanism according to network conditions. To fulfill the second objective, we further enhanced the performance of DTN routing by introducing message scheduling and dropping policies such that the delivery ratio is increased and/or the delivery delay is reduced. This thesis investigates new buffer management and scheduling policies to improve the performance of flooding and utility-based forwarding routing in DTNs, such that the forwarding/dropping decision can be made at a node during each contact for either optimal message delivery ratio or message delivery delay. To examine their effectiveness, the introduced protocols and the buffer management and scheduling policies have been implemented and compared to a number of existing counterpart approaches. A near-realistic mobility model is used for testing. A number of scenarios are used to evaluate the performance of the introduced techniques in terms of delivery delay, ratio, and the number of transmissions performed

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

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

Efficient Passive Clustering and Gateways selection MANETs

Passive clustering does not employ control packets to collect topological information in ad hoc networks. In our proposal, we avoid making frequent changes in cluster architecture due to repeated election and re-election of cluster heads and gateways. Our primary objective has been to make Passive Clustering more practical by employing optimal number of gateways and reduce the number of rebroadcast packets