Design and analysis of a beacon-less routing protocol for large volume content dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Largevolumecontentdisseminationispursuedbythegrowingnumberofhighquality applications for Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks(VANETs), e.g., the live road surveillance service and the video-based overtaking assistant service. For the highly dynamical vehicular network topology, beacon-less routing protocols have been proven to be efficient in achieving a balance between the system performance and the control overhead. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, the routing design for large volume content has not been well considered in the previous work, which will introduce new challenges, e.g., the enhanced connectivity requirement for a radio link. In this paper, a link Lifetime-aware Beacon-less Routing Protocol (LBRP) is designed for large volume content delivery in VANETs. Each vehicle makes the forwarding decision based on the message header information and its current state, including the speed and position information. A semi-Markov process analytical model is proposed to evaluate the expected delay in constructing one routing path for LBRP. Simulations show that the proposed LBRP scheme outperforms the traditional dissemination protocols in providing a low end-to-end delay. The analytical model is shown to exhibit a good match on the delay estimation with Monte Carlo simulations, as well

Reliable Data Transmission in Challenging Vehicular Network using Delay Tolerant Network

In the 21st century, there has been an increasing tendency toward the wide adoption of wireless networks and technologies due to their significant advantages such as flexibility, mobility, accessibility, and low cost. Wireless technologies have therefore become essential factors in the improvement of intra-vehicle road safety in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), which potentially reduce road traffic accidents by enabling efficient exchange of information between vehicles in the early stages. However, due to the inherent high mobility and rapid change of topology, there are numerous challenges in VANET. Hence, different software packages have been combined in this project to create the VANET environment, whereby the Objective Modular Network Testbed (OMNeT++) and the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO), along with Vehicles in Network Simulation (VEINS) are integrated to model the VANET environment. Also, Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) are implemented in the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator, where the Store-Carry-Forward technique is used to route traffic. When network resources are not limited, a high delivery ratio is possible. However, when network resources are scarce, these protocols will have a low delivery ratio and high overhead. Due to these limitations, in this research, an extensive performance evaluation of various routing protocols for DTN with different buffer management policies, giving insight into the impact of these policies on DTN routing protocol performance has been conducted. The empirical study gave insight into the strengths and limitations of the existing protocols thus enabling the selection of the benchmark protocols utilized in evaluating a new Enhanced Message Replication Technique (EMRT) proposed in this thesis. The main contribution of this thesis is the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel EMRT that dynamically adjusts the number of message replicas based on a node's ability to quickly disseminate the message and maximize the delivery ratio. EMRT is evaluated using three different quota protocols: Spray&Wait, Encounter Based Routing (EBR), and Destination Based Routing Protocol (DBRP). Simulation results show that applying EMRT to these protocols improves the delivery ratio while reducing overhead ratio and latency average. For example, when combined with Spray&Wait, EBR, and DBRP, the delivery probability is improved by 13%, 8%, and 10%, respectively, while the latency average is reduced by 51%, 14%, and 13%, respectively

Efficient RSU Selection Approaches for Load Balancing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Due to advances in wireless communication technologies, wireless transmissions gradually replace traditional wired data transmissions. In recent years, vehicles on the move can also enjoy the convenience of wireless communication technologies by assisting each other in message exchange and form an interconnecting network, namely Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). In a VANET, each vehicle is capable of communicating with nearby vehicles and accessing information provided by the network. There are two basic communication models in VANETs, V2V and V2I. Vehicles equipped with wireless transceiver can communicate with other vehicles (V2V) or roadside units (RSUs) (V2I). RSUs acting as gateways are entry points to the Internet for vehicles. Naturally, vehicles tend to choose nearby RSUs as serving gateways. However, due to uneven density distribution and high mobility nature of vehicles, load imbalance of RSUs can happen. In this paper, we study the RSU load-balancing problem and propose two solutions. In the first solution, the whole network is divided into sub-regions based on RSUs’ locations. A RSU provides Internet access for vehicles in its sub-region and the boundaries between sub-regions change dynamically to adopt to load migration. In the second solution, vehicles choose their serving RSUs distributedly by taking their future trajectories and RSUs’ loading information into considerations. From simulation results, the proposed methods can improve packet delivery ratio, packet delay, and load balance among RSUs

Modeling and Measuring Performance of Data Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks

In this thesis we focus on understanding, measuring and describing the performance of Opportunistic Networks (ONs) and their applications. An “opportunistic network” is a term introduced to describe a sparse, wireless, ad hoc network with highly mobile nodes. The opportunistic networking paradigm deviates from the traditional end-to-end connectivity concept: Forwarding is based on intermittent connectivity between mobile nodes (typically, users with wireless devices); complete routes between sources and destinations rarely exist. Due to this unique property of spontaneous link establishment, the challenges that exist in ONs are specific. The unstructured nature of these networks makes it difficult to give any performance guarantees on data dissemination. For this reason, in Part I of this thesis we explore the dynamics that affect the performance of opportunistic networks. We choose a number of meaningful scenarios where our models and algorithms can be validated using large and credible data sets. We show that a drift and jump model that takes a spatial approach succeeds in capturing the impact of infrastructure and mobile-to-mobile exchanges on an opportunistic content update system. We describe the effects of these dynamics by using the age distribution of a dynamic piece of data (i.e., information updates) as the performance measure. The model also succeeds in capturing a strong bias in user mobility and reveals the existence of regions, whose statistics play a critical role in the performance perceived in the network. We exploit these findings to design an application for greedy infrastructure placement, which relies on the model approximation for a large number of nodes. Another great challenge of opportunistic networking lies in the fact that the bandwidth available on wireless links, coupled with ad hoc networking, failed to rival the capacity of backbones and to establish opportunistic networks as an alternative to infrastructure-based networks. For this reason, we never study ONs in an isolated context. Instead, we consider the applications that leverage interconnection between opportunistic networks and legacy networks and we study the benefits this synergy brings to both. Following this approach, we use a large operator-provided data set to show that opportunistic networks (based on Wi-Fi) are capable of offloading a significant amount of traffic from 3G networks. At the same time, the offloading algorithms we propose reduce the amount of energy consumed by mobiles, while requiring Wi-Fi coverage that is several times smaller than in the case of real-time offloading. Again we confirm and reuse the fact that user mobility is biased towards certain regions of the network. In Part II of this thesis, we treat another issue that is essential for the acceptance and evolution of opportunistic networks and their applications. Namely, we address the absence of experimental results that would support the findings of simulation based studies. Although the techniques such as contact-based simulations should intuitively be able to capture the performance of opportunistic applications, this intuition has little evidence in practice. For this reason, we design and deploy an experiment with real users who use an opportunistic Twitter application, in a way that allows them to maintain communication with legacy networks (i.e., cellular networks, the Internet). The experiment gives us a unique insight into certain performance aspects that are typically hidden or misinterpreted when the usual evaluation techniques (such as simulation) are used. We show that, due to the commonly ignored factors (such as the limited transmission bandwidth), contact-based simulations significantly overestimate delivery ratio and obtain delays that are several times lower than those experimentally acquired. In addition to this, our results unanimously show that the common practice of assuming infinite cache sizes in simulation studies, leads to a misinterpretation of the effects of a backbone on an opportunistic network. Such simulations typically overestimate the performance of the opportunistic component, while underestimating the utility of the backbone. Given the discovered deficiencies of the contact-based simulations, we consider an alternative statistical treatment of contact traces that uses the weighted contact graph. We show that this approach offers a better interpretation of the impact of a backbone on an opportunistic network and results in a closer match when it comes to modeling certain aspects of performance (namely, delivery ratio). Finally, the security requirements for the opportunistic applications that involve an interconnection with legacy networks are also highly specific. They cannot be fully addressed by the solutions proposed in the context of autonomous opportunistic (or ad hoc) networks, nor by the security frameworks used for securing the applications with continuous connectivity. Thus, in Part III of this thesis, we put together a security framework that fits the networks and applications that we target (i.e., the opportunistic networks and applications with occasional Internet connectivity). We then focus on the impact of security print on network performance and design a scheme for the protection of optimal relaying capacity in an opportunistic multihop network. We fine-tune the parameters of our scheme by using a game-theoretic approach and we demonstrate the substantial performance gains provided by the scheme