The Dynamics of Vehicular Networks in Urban Environments

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have emerged as a platform to support intelligent inter-vehicle communication and improve traffic safety and performance. The road-constrained, high mobility of vehicles, their unbounded power source, and the emergence of roadside wireless infrastructures make VANETs a challenging research topic. A key to the development of protocols for inter-vehicle communication and services lies in the knowledge of the topological characteristics of the VANET communication graph. This paper explores the dynamics of VANETs in urban environments and investigates the impact of these findings in the design of VANET routing protocols. Using both real and realistic mobility traces, we study the networking shape of VANETs under different transmission and market penetration ranges. Given that a number of RSUs have to be deployed for disseminating information to vehicles in an urban area, we also study their impact on vehicular connectivity. Through extensive simulations we investigate the performance of VANET routing protocols by exploiting the knowledge of VANET graphs analysis.Comment: Revised our testbed with even more realistic mobility traces. Used the location of real Wi-Fi hotspots to simulate RSUs in our study. Used a larger, real mobility trace set, from taxis in Shanghai. Examine the implications of our findings in the design of VANET routing protocols by implementing in ns-3 two routing protocols (GPCR & VADD). Updated the bibliography section with new research work

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Recent Developments on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled "Recent Developments on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks”. These works expose the readership to the latest solutions and techniques for MANETs and VANETs. They cover interesting topics such as power-aware optimization solutions for MANETs, data dissemination in VANETs, adaptive multi-hop broadcast schemes for VANETs, multi-metric routing protocols for VANETs, and incentive mechanisms to encourage the distribution of information in VANETs. The book demonstrates pioneering work in these fields, investigates novel solutions and methods, and discusses future trends in these field

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of-the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: quality-of-service and video communication, routing protocol and cross-layer design. A few interesting problems about security and delay-tolerant networks are also discussed. This book is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks

Self-organizing Network Optimization via Placement of Additional Nodes

Das Hauptforschungsgebiet des Graduiertenkollegs "International Graduate School on Mobile Communication" (GS Mobicom) der Technischen Universität Ilmenau ist die Kommunikation in Katastrophenszenarien. Wegen eines Desasters oder einer Katastrophe können die terrestrischen Elementen der Infrastruktur eines Kommunikationsnetzwerks beschädigt oder komplett zerstört werden. Dennoch spielen verfügbare Kommunikationsnetze eine sehr wichtige Rolle während der Rettungsmaßnahmen, besonders für die Koordinierung der Rettungstruppen und für die Kommunikation zwischen ihren Mitgliedern. Ein solcher Service kann durch ein mobiles Ad-Hoc-Netzwerk (MANET) zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Ein typisches Problem der MANETs ist Netzwerkpartitionierung, welche zur Isolation von verschiedenen Knotengruppen führt. Eine mögliche Lösung dieses Problems ist die Positionierung von zusätzlichen Knoten, welche die Verbindung zwischen den isolierten Partitionen wiederherstellen können. Hauptziele dieser Arbeit sind die Recherche und die Entwicklung von Algorithmen und Methoden zur Positionierung der zusätzlichen Knoten. Der Fokus der Recherche liegt auf Untersuchung der verteilten Algorithmen zur Bestimmung der Positionen für die zusätzlichen Knoten. Die verteilten Algorithmen benutzen nur die Information, welche in einer lokalen Umgebung eines Knotens verfügbar ist, und dadurch entsteht ein selbstorganisierendes System. Jedoch wird das gesamte Netzwerk hier vor allem innerhalb eines ganz speziellen Szenarios - Katastrophenszenario - betrachtet. In einer solchen Situation kann die Information über die Topologie des zu reparierenden Netzwerks im Voraus erfasst werden und soll, natürlich, für die Wiederherstellung mitbenutzt werden. Dank der eventuell verfügbaren zusätzlichen Information können die Positionen für die zusätzlichen Knoten genauer ermittelt werden. Die Arbeit umfasst eine Beschreibung, Implementierungsdetails und eine Evaluierung eines selbstorganisierendes Systems, welche die Netzwerkwiederherstellung in beiden Szenarien ermöglicht.The main research area of the International Graduate School on Mobile Communication (GS Mobicom) at Ilmenau University of Technology is communication in disaster scenarios. Due to a disaster or an accident, the network infrastructure can be damaged or even completely destroyed. However, available communication networks play a vital role during the rescue activities especially for the coordination of the rescue teams and for the communication between their members. Such a communication service can be provided by a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET). One of the typical problems of a MANET is network partitioning, when separate groups of nodes become isolated from each other. One possible solution for this problem is the placement of additional nodes in order to reconstruct the communication links between isolated network partitions. The primary goal of this work is the research and development of algorithms and methods for the placement of additional nodes. The focus of this research lies on the investigation of distributed algorithms for the placement of additional nodes, which use only the information from the nodes’ local environment and thus form a self-organizing system. However, during the usage specifics of the system in a disaster scenario, global information about the topology of the network to be recovered can be known or collected in advance. In this case, it is of course reasonable to use this information in order to calculate the placement positions more precisely. The work provides the description, the implementation details and the evaluation of a self-organizing system which is able to recover from network partitioning in both situations

Mesh-Mon: a Monitoring and Management System for Wireless Mesh Networks

A mesh network is a network of wireless routers that employ multi-hop routing and can be used to provide network access for mobile clients. Mobile mesh networks can be deployed rapidly to provide an alternate communication infrastructure for emergency response operations in areas with limited or damaged infrastructure. In this dissertation, we present Dart-Mesh: a Linux-based layer-3 dual-radio two-tiered mesh network that provides complete 802.11b coverage in the Sudikoff Lab for Computer Science at Dartmouth College. We faced several challenges in building, testing, monitoring and managing this network. These challenges motivated us to design and implement Mesh-Mon, a network monitoring system to aid system administrators in the management of a mobile mesh network. Mesh-Mon is a scalable, distributed and decentralized management system in which mesh nodes cooperate in a proactive manner to help detect, diagnose and resolve network problems automatically. Mesh-Mon is independent of the routing protocol used by the mesh routing layer and can function even if the routing protocol fails. We demonstrate this feature by running Mesh-Mon on two versions of Dart-Mesh, one running on AODV (a reactive mesh routing protocol) and the second running on OLSR (a proactive mesh routing protocol) in separate experiments. Mobility can cause links to break, leading to disconnected partitions. We identify critical nodes in the network, whose failure may cause a partition. We introduce two new metrics based on social-network analysis: the Localized Bridging Centrality (LBC) metric and the Localized Load-aware Bridging Centrality (LLBC) metric, that can identify critical nodes efficiently and in a fully distributed manner. We run a monitoring component on client nodes, called Mesh-Mon-Ami, which also assists Mesh-Mon nodes in the dissemination of management information between physically disconnected partitions, by acting as carriers for management data. We conclude, from our experimental evaluation on our 16-node Dart-Mesh testbed, that our system solves several management challenges in a scalable manner, and is a useful and effective tool for monitoring and managing real-world mesh networks

LVMM: The Localized Vehicular Multicast Middleware - a Framework for Ad Hoc Inter-Vehicles Multicast Communications

This thesis defines a novel semantic for multicast in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and it defines a middleware, the Localized Vehicular Multicast Middleware (LVMM) that enables minimum cost, source-based multicast communications in VANETs. The middleware provides support to find vehicles suitable to sustain multicast communications, to maintain multicast groups, and to execute a multicast routing protocol, the Vehicular Multicast Routing Protocol (VMRP), that delivers messages of multicast applications to all the recipients utilizing a loop-free, minimum cost path from each source to all the recipients. LVMM does not require a vehicle to know all other members: only knowledge of directly reachable nodes is required to perform the source-based routing