Experimentation with MANETs of Smartphones

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively survey existing possibilities to build applications on top of ad-hoc smartphone networks for experimentation purposes, and introduce a taxonomy to classify them. We present AdHocDroid, an Android package that creates an IP-level MANET of (rooted) Android smartphones, and make it publicly available to the community. AdHocDroid supports standard TCP/IP applications, providing real smartphone IEEE 802.11 MANET and the capability to easily change the routing protocol. We tested our framework on several smartphones and a laptop. We validate the MANET running off-the-shelf applications, and reporting on experimental performance evaluation, including network metrics and battery discharge rate.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Data Connectivity and Smart Group Formation in Wi-Fi Direct Multi-group Networks

Users of Device-to-Device (D2D) communication need efficient content discovery mechanisms to steer their requests toward the node in their neighborhood that is most likely to satisfy them. The problem is further compounded by the lack of a central coordination entity as well as by the inherent mobility of devices, which leads to volatile topologies. In this paper, we first discuss group-based communication among non-rooted Android devices using Wi-Fi Direct, a protocol recently standardized by the Wi-Fi Alliance. We propose intra- and inter-group communication methodologies, which we validate through a simple testbed where content-centric routing is used. Next, we address the autonomous formation of groups with the goal of achieving efficient device resource utilization as well as full connectivity. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our group formation procedure both in simulation and in a real testbed involving Android devices in different topologies

Business scenarios, technical challenges and system requirements - D2.1

Deliverable D2.1 del projecte Europeu OneFIT (ICT-2009-257385)Preprin

Context-Aware Configuration and Management of WiFi Direct Groups for Real Opportunistic Networks

Wi-Fi Direct is a promising technology for the support of device-to-device communications (D2D) on commercial mobile devices. However, the standard as-it-is is not sufficient to support the real deployment of networking solutions entirely based on D2D such as opportunistic networks. In fact, WiFi Direct presents some characteristics that could limit the autonomous creation of D2D connections among users' personal devices. Specifically, the standard explicitly requires the user's authorization to establish a connection between two or more devices, and it provides a limited support for inter-group communication. In some cases, this might lead to the creation of isolated groups of nodes which cannot communicate among each other. In this paper, we propose a novel middleware-layer protocol for the efficient configuration and management of WiFi Direct groups (WiFi Direct Group Manager, WFD-GM) to enable autonomous connections and inter-group communication. This enables opportunistic networks in real conditions (e.g., variable mobility and network size). WFD-GM defines a context function that takes into account heterogeneous parameters for the creation of the best group configuration in a specific time window, including an index of nodes' stability and power levels. We evaluate the protocol performances by simulating three reference scenarios including different mobility models, geographical areas and number of nodes. Simulations are also supported by experimental results related to the evaluation in a real testbed of the involved context parameters. We compare WFD-GM with the state-of-the-art solutions and we show that it performs significantly better than a Baseline approach in scenarios with medium/low mobility, and it is comparable with it in case of high mobility, without introducing additional overhead.Comment: Accepted by the IEEE 14th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), 201

Quantifying Device-to-Device Data Transfer in 802.11 Wireless Networks

Opportunistic contacts can be very short-lived, i.e., they usually last for a few seconds to several minutes. During the short connection window of an opportunistic contact, it is important to maximize the data transfer between the nodes. The amount of data that can be transferred during an opportunistic contact (i.e., contact capability) will depend on the link layer connection establishment delay, IP address acquisition delay as well as on the data throughput. If the opportunistic network is aimed for service provisioning, the delay of the service discovery phase is also needed to be taken into account while defining the capability of the contact. Moreover, the wireless environment where the opportunistic contacts take place, can influence the overall capability of the opportunistic contacts. In the thesis, we get the opportunity to put emphasize on all these factors while quantifying the opportunistic contacts (i.e., device-to-device data transfer) in indoor 802.11b Wi-Fi networks (Infrastructure mode). This thesis makes several original contributions. First, we carefully design the indoor wireless testbed and to facilitate the experiments we build a Service Browser and Service Publisher application. Second, we conduct a site survey in the testbed area to gain an understanding on the indoor RF wave propagation characteristics. Third, we perform experiments, where we collect traces during the link-layer connection establishment, IP address acquisition and service discovery phases of opportunistic contacts. Using the collected data, we measure the delays of the different events/steps that take place during the phases mentioned above. Furthermore, we run experiments to investigate the throughput performance of data transmission between the nodes when TCP is used as the transport layer protocol and thus to check the suitability of TCP in opportunistic networks

Results analysis and validation - D5.3

Deliverable D5.3 del projecte OneFITPostprint (author’s final draft

Validation platform implementation description – D5.2

Deliverable D5.2 del projecte OneFITPostprint (published version

Universal Mobile Service Execution Framework for Device-To-Device Collaborations

There are high demands of effective and high-performance of collaborations between mobile devices in the places where traditional Internet connections are unavailable, unreliable, or significantly overburdened, such as on a battlefield, disaster zones, isolated rural areas, or crowded public venues. To enable collaboration among the devices in opportunistic networks, code offloading and Remote Method Invocation are the two major mechanisms to ensure code portions of applications are successfully transmitted to and executed on the remote platforms. Although these domains are highly enjoyed in research for a decade, the limitations of multi-device connectivity, system error handling or cross platform compatibility prohibit these technologies from being broadly applied in the mobile industry. To address the above problems, we designed and developed UMSEF - an Universal Mobile Service Execution Framework, which is an innovative and radical approach for mobile computing in opportunistic networks. Our solution is built as a component-based mobile middleware architecture that is flexible and adaptive with multiple network topologies, tolerant for network errors and compatible for multiple platforms. We provided an effective algorithm to estimate the resource availability of a device for higher performance and energy consumption and a novel platform for mobile remote method invocation based on declarative annotations over multi-group device networks. The experiments in reality exposes our approach not only achieve the better performance and energy consumption, but can be extended to large-scaled ubiquitous or IoT systems