Ant-based Routing Schemes for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

An ad-hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes, which communicate over radio. These networks have an important advantage; they do not require any existing infrastructure or central administration. Therefore, mobile ad-hoc networks are suitable for temporary communication links. This flexibility, however, comes at a price: communication is difficult to organize due to frequent topology changes. Routing in such networks can be viewed as a distributed optimization problem. A new class of algorithms, inspired by swarm intelligence, is currently being developed that can potentially solve numerous problems of modern communications networks. These algorithms rely on the interaction of a multitude of simultaneously interacting agents. A survey of few such algorithms for ad hoc networks is presented here

Context Aware Service Oriented Computing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

These days we witness a major shift towards small, mobile devices, capable of wireless communication. Their communication capabilities enable them to form mobile ad hoc networks and share resources and capabilities. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new emerging paradigm for distributed computing that has evolved from object-oriented and component-oriented computing to enable applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Services are autonomous computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, and orchestrated for the purpose of developing applications. The application of the SOC model to mobile devices provides a loosely coupled model for distributed processing in a resource-poor and highly dynamic environment. Cooperation in a mobile ad hoc environment depends on the fundamental capability of hosts to communicate with each other. Peer-to-peer interactions among hosts within communication range allow such interactions but limit the scope of interactions to a local region. Routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks extend the scope of interactions to cover all hosts transitively connected over multi-hop routes. Additional contextual information, e.g., knowledge about the movement of hosts in physical space, can help extend the boundaries of interactions beyond the limits of an island of connectivity. To help separate concerns specific to different layers, a coordination model between the routing layer and the SOC layer provides abstractions that mask the details characteristic to the network layer from the distributed computing semantics above. This thesis explores some of the opportunities and challenges raised by applying the SOC paradigm to mobile computing in ad hoc networks. It investigates the implications of disconnections on service advertising and discovery mechanisms. It addresses issues related to code migration in addition to physical host movement. It also investigates some of the security concerns in ad hoc networking service provision. It presents a novel routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks and a novel coordination model that addresses space and time explicitly

Communication Algorithms for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In this dissertation we present deterministic algorithms for reliable and efficient communication in ad hoc networks. In the first part of this dissertation we give a specification for a reliable neighbor discovery layer for mobile ad hoc networks. We present two different algorithms that implement this layer with varying progress guarantees. In the second part of this dissertation we give an algorithm which allows nodes in a mobile wireless ad hoc network to communicate reliably and at the same time maintain local neighborhood information. In the last part of this dissertation we look at the distributed trigger counting problem in the wireless ad hoc network setting. We present a deterministic algorithm for this problem which is communication efficient in terms of the the maximum number of messages received by any processor in the system

Maximal Group Membership in Ad Hoc Networks

International audienceThe notion of Group communication has long been introduced as a core service of distributed systems. More recently, this notion appeared with a somewhat different meaning in the field of mobile ad hoc systems. In this context, we study the group membership problem. After specifying the basic safety properties of such groups and a maximality criterion based on cliques, we propose a group membership algorithm. Lastly, with respect to this criterion, we compare our algorithm with two group membership algorithms for ad hoc environments. Moreover, a formal description in TLA+ has been programmed and verified by model-checking for small networks

Epcast: Controlled Dissemination in Human-based Wireless Networks by means of Epidemic Spreading Models

Epidemics-inspired techniques have received huge attention in recent years from the distributed systems and networking communities. These algorithms and protocols rely on probabilistic message replication and redundancy to ensure reliable communication. Moreover, they have been successfully exploited to support group communication in distributed systems, broadcasting, multicasting and information dissemination in fixed and mobile networks. However, in most of the existing work, the probability of infection is determined heuristically, without relying on any analytical model. This often leads to unnecessarily high transmission overheads. In this paper we show that models of epidemic spreading in complex networks can be applied to the problem of tuning and controlling the dissemination of information in wireless ad hoc networks composed of devices carried by individuals, i.e., human-based networks. The novelty of our idea resides in the evaluation and exploitation of the structure of the underlying human network for the automatic tuning of the dissemination process in order to improve the protocol performance. We evaluate the results using synthetic mobility models and real human contacts traces

Distributed Allocation of Workflow Tasks in MANETs

When multiple participants work on a workflow that represents a large, collaborative activity, it is important to have a well defined process to determine the portions of the workflow that each participant is responsible for executing. In this paper, we describe a process and related algorithms required to assign tasks in a workflow, to hosts that are willing to carry out the execution of these tasks, and thereby contributing to the completion of the activity. This problem is a stylized form of the multi-processor scheduling algorithm which has been shown to be NP-Hard. Further complicating the issue is that we are targeting our approach to mobile ad hoc networks, where hosts are physically mobile, communication links are frequently interrupted, and spatiotemporal considerations become increasingly important. We describe a distributed approach to task allocation in mobile ad hoc networks that employs heuristics to assign tasks in a workflow to mobile hosts based on their capabilities and their mobility patterns. We have implemented our algorithms in the context of CiAN, a workflow management system (WfMS) supporting collaborations in a mobile environment. In addition, we also present performance data of our algorithm and compare it to naive and brute force approaches