Relieving the Wireless Infrastructure: When Opportunistic Networks Meet Guaranteed Delays

Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemination framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be reinjected into the network through the 3G interface. Push-and-Track includes multiple strategies to determine how many copies of the content should be injected, when, and to whom. The short delay-tolerance of common content, such as news or road traffic updates, make them suitable for such a system. Based on a realistic large-scale vehicular dataset from the city of Bologna composed of more than 10,000 vehicles, we demonstrate that Push-and-Track consistently meets its delivery objectives while reducing the use of the 3G network by over 90%.Comment: Accepted at IEEE WoWMoM 2011 conferenc

Predicting topology propagation messages in mobile ad hoc networks: The value of history

This research was funded by the Spanish Government under contracts TIN2016-77836-C2-1-R,TIN2016-77836-C2-2-R, and DPI2016-77415-R, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya as Consolidated ResearchGroups 2017-SGR-688 and 2017-SGR-990.The mobile ad hoc communication in highly dynamic scenarios, like urban evacuations or search-and-rescue processes, plays a key role in coordinating the activities performed by the participants. Particularly, counting on message routing enhances the communication capability among these actors. Given the high dynamism of these networks and their low bandwidth, having mechanisms to predict the network topology offers several potential advantages; e.g., to reduce the number of topology propagation messages delivered through the network, the consumption of resources in the nodes and the amount of redundant retransmissions. Most strategies reported in the literature to perform these predictions are limited to support high mobility, consume a large amount of resources or require training. In order to contribute towards addressing that challenge, this paper presents a history-based predictor (HBP), which is a prediction strategy based on the assumption that some topological changes in these networks have happened before in the past, therefore, the predictor can take advantage of these patterns following a simple and low-cost approach. The article extends a previous proposal of the authors and evaluates its impact in highly mobile scenarios through the implementation of a real predictor for the optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol. The use of this predictor, named OLSR-HBP, shows a reduction of 40–55% of topology propagation messages compared to the regular OLSR protocol. Moreover, the use of this predictor has a low cost in terms of CPU and memory consumption, and it can also be used with other routing protocols.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Smartening the Environment using Wireless Sensor Networks in a Developing Country

The miniaturization process of various sensing devices has become a reality by enormous research and advancements accomplished in Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) lithography. Regardless of such extensive efforts in optimizing the hardware, algorithm, and protocols for networking, there still remains a lot of scope to explore how these innovations can all be tied together to design Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for smartening the surrounding environment for some practical purposes. In this paper we explore the prospects of wireless sensor networks and propose a design level framework for developing a smart environment using WSNs, which could be beneficial for a developing country like Bangladesh. In connection to this, we also discuss the major aspects of wireless sensor networks.Comment: 5 page

Distributed and Load-Adaptive Self Configuration in Sensor Networks

Proactive self-configuration is crucial for MANETs such as sensor networks, as these are often deployed in hostile environments and are ad hoc in nature. The dynamic architecture of the network is monitored by exchanging so-called Network State Beacons (NSBs) between key network nodes. The Beacon Exchange rate and the network state define both the time and nature of a proactive action to combat network performance degradation at a time of crisis. It is thus essential to optimize these parameters for the dynamic load profile of the network. This paper presents a novel distributed adaptive optimization Beacon Exchange selection model which considers distributed network load for energy efficient monitoring and proactive reconfiguration of the network. The results show an improvement of 70% in throughput, while maintaining a guaranteed quality-of- service for a small control-traffic overhead

On the Security of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Protocol

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the communications protocol currently being rolled out as part of next generation air transportation systems. As the heart of modern air traffic control, it will play an essential role in the protection of two billion passengers per year, besides being crucial to many other interest groups in aviation. The inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol has long been a topic in both the aviation circles and in the academic community. Due to recently published proof-of-concept attacks, the topic is becoming ever more pressing, especially with the deadline for mandatory implementation in most airspaces fast approaching. This survey first summarizes the attacks and problems that have been reported in relation to ADS-B security. Thereafter, it surveys both the theoretical and practical efforts which have been previously conducted concerning these issues, including possible countermeasures. In addition, the survey seeks to go beyond the current state of the art and gives a detailed assessment of security measures which have been developed more generally for related wireless networks such as sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks, including a taxonomy of all considered approaches.Comment: Survey, 22 Pages, 21 Figure