IF-MANET: Interoperable framework for heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

The advances in low power micro-processors, wireless networks and embedded systems have raised the need to utilize the significant resources of mobile devices. These devices for example, smart phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and sensors are gaining enormous processing power, storage capacity and wireless bandwidth. In addition, the advancement in wireless mobile technology has created a new communication paradigm via which a wireless network can be created without any priori infrastructure called mobile ad hoc network (MANET). While progress is being made towards improving the efficiencies of mobile devices and reliability of wireless mobile networks, the mobile technology is continuously facing the challenges of un-predictable disconnections, dynamic mobility and the heterogeneity of routing protocols. Hence, the traditional wired, wireless routing protocols are not suitable for MANET due to its unique dynamic ad hoc nature. Due to the reason, the research community has developed and is busy developing protocols for routing in MANET to cope with the challenges of MANET. However, there are no single generic ad hoc routing protocols available so far, which can address all the basic challenges of MANET as mentioned before. Thus this diverse range of ever growing routing protocols has created barriers for mobile nodes of different MANET taxonomies to intercommunicate and hence wasting a huge amount of valuable resources. To provide interaction between heterogeneous MANETs, the routing protocols require conversion of packets, meta-model and their behavioural capabilities. Here, the fundamental challenge is to understand the packet level message format, meta-model and behaviour of different routing protocols, which are significantly different for different MANET Taxonomies. To overcome the above mentioned issues, this thesis proposes an Interoperable Framework for heterogeneous MANETs called IF-MANET. The framework hides the complexities of heterogeneous routing protocols and provides a homogeneous layer for seamless communication between these routing protocols. The framework creates a unique Ontology for MANET routing protocols and a Message Translator to semantically compare the packets and generates the missing fields using the rules defined in the Ontology. Hence, the translation between an existing as well as newly arriving routing protocols will be achieved dynamically and on-the-fly. To discover a route for the delivery of packets across heterogeneous MANET taxonomies, the IF-MANET creates a special Gateway node to provide cluster based inter-domain routing. The IF-MANET framework can be used to develop different middleware applications. For example: Mobile grid computing that could potentially utilise huge amounts of aggregated data collected from heterogeneous mobile devices. Disaster & crises management applications can be created to provide on-the-fly infrastructure-less emergency communication across organisations by utilising different MANET taxonomies

SEMAN - uma proposta de Middleware seguro para as redes ad hoc móveis

Orientador : Prof. Dr. Luiz Carlos Pessoa AlbiniTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Exatas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação. Defesa: Curitiba, 04/04/2014Inclui referênciasResumo: Devido às particularidades das redes ad hoc móveis (MANETs - Mobile Ad Hoc Networks), como a topologia dinâmica, a ausência de infraestrutura e a sua característica decentralizada, a implementação de aplicações complexas e flexíveis para estas redes torna-se um desafio. Para permitir o desenvolvimento dessas aplicações, diversas soluções de middleware foram propostas. Contudo, as soluções encontradas não consideram plenamente os requisitos de segurança dessas redes. Este trabalho apresenta um estudo dos middlewares propostos para as MANETs, relatando o seu funcionamento e apresentando um comparativo das funcionalidades disponíveis. Esses middlewares são categorizados de acordo com a seguinte classificação, proposta neste trabalho: baseados em espaços de tuplas, baseados em P2P, baseados em contexto, cross-layer e orientados à aplicação. Em seguida, com base nas limitações estudadas, é proposto um novo middleware de segurança para as MANETs, chamado de SEcure Middleware for Ad hoc Mobile Networks (SEMAN - Middleware seguro para as redes ad hoc móveis), que fornece um conjunto de serviços de segurança para facilitar o desenvolvimento de aplicações distribuídas, complexas e flexíveis. Para fornecer tais serviços e garantir a segurança, o SEMAN considera o contexto das aplicações e organiza os nós em grupos, também baseados nesses contextos. O middleware prevê três módulos: serviço, processamento e segurança. O módulo de serviço é responsável por manter todos os serviços e aplicações que são disponibilizados pelo nó hospedeiro a outros nós da rede. O módulo de processamento é responsável por manter o funcionamento central do middleware, atendendo os pedidos e gerenciando o registro dos serviços e componentes disponíveis. O módulo de segurança é o ponto principal do middleware e o foco desta tese. Ele possui os componentes de gerenciamento de chaves, de confiança e de grupos. Todos esses componentes foram desenvolvidos pelo autor e são descritos neste trabalho. Eles são suportados por um núcleo de operações criptográficas e atuam de acordo com regras e políticas de segurança. A integração desses componentes fornece garantias de segurança contra ataques às aplicações que utilizam o middleware.Abstract: Due to the particularities of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), as their dynamic topology, lack of infrastructure and decentralized characteristic, the implementation of complex and flexible applications is a challenge. To enable the deployment of these applications, several middleware solutions were proposed. However, these solutions do not completely consider the security requirements of these networks. This thesis presents middleware solutions for MANETs, by describing their operations and presenting a comparative of the available functionalities. The middlewares were grouped according to this classification: tuple space-based, P2P-based, context-based, cross-layer and applicationoriented. Then, based on the limitations of the studied solutions, a new secure middleware is proposed, called SEcure Middleware for Ad hoc Networks (SEMAN), which provides a set of basic and secure services to MANETs aiming to facilitate the development of distributed, complex and flexible applications. To provide such services and ensure security to the applications, SEMAN considers the context of applications and organizes nodes into groups, also based on these contexts. The middleware includes three modules: service, processing, and security. Service module is responsible for maintaining all services and applications hosted by nodes. The processing module is responsible for maintaining the middleware core operation, listening the requests and managing the registry of available services and components. The security module is the main part of the middleware and the focus of this thesis. It has the following components: key management, trust management and group management. All these components were developed and are described in this work. They are supported by a cryptographic core and behave according to security rules and policies. The integration of these components provides security assurance against attacks to the applications that use the middleware

An Emergent Architecture for Scaling Decentralized Communication Systems (DCS)

With recent technological advancements now accelerating the mobile and wireless Internet solution space, a ubiquitous computing Internet is well within the research and industrial community's design reach - a decentralized system design, which is not solely driven by static physical models and sound engineering principals, but more dynamically, perhaps sub-optimally at initial deployment and socially-influenced in its evolution. To complement today's Internet system, this thesis proposes a Decentralized Communication System (DCS) architecture with the following characteristics: flat physical topologies with numerous compute oriented and communication intensive nodes in the network with many of these nodes operating in multiple functional roles; self-organizing virtual structures formed through alternative mobility scenarios and capable of serving ad hoc networking formations; emergent operations and control with limited dependency on centralized control and management administration. Today, decentralized systems are not commercially scalable or viable for broad adoption in the same way we have to come to rely on the Internet or telephony systems. The premise in this thesis is that DCS can reach high levels of resilience, usefulness, scale that the industry has come to experience with traditional centralized systems by exploiting the following properties: (i.) network density and topological diversity; (ii.) self-organization and emergent attributes; (iii.) cooperative and dynamic infrastructure; and (iv.) node role diversity. This thesis delivers key contributions towards advancing the current state of the art in decentralized systems. First, we present the vision and a conceptual framework for DCS. Second, the thesis demonstrates that such a framework and concept architecture is feasible by prototyping a DCS platform that exhibits the above properties or minimally, demonstrates that these properties are feasible through prototyped network services. Third, this work expands on an alternative approach to network clustering using hierarchical virtual clusters (HVC) to facilitate self-organizing network structures. With increasing network complexity, decentralized systems can generally lead to unreliable and irregular service quality, especially given unpredictable node mobility and traffic dynamics. The HVC framework is an architectural strategy to address organizational disorder associated with traditional decentralized systems. The proposed HVC architecture along with the associated promotional methodology organizes distributed control and management services by leveraging alternative organizational models (e.g., peer-to-peer (P2P), centralized or tiered) in hierarchical and virtual fashion. Through simulation and analytical modeling, we demonstrate HVC efficiencies in DCS structural scalability and resilience by comparing static and dynamic HVC node configurations against traditional physical configurations based on P2P, centralized or tiered structures. Next, an emergent management architecture for DCS exploiting HVC for self-organization, introduces emergence as an operational approach to scaling DCS services for state management and policy control. In this thesis, emergence scales in hierarchical fashion using virtual clustering to create multiple tiers of local and global separation for aggregation, distribution and network control. Emergence is an architectural objective, which HVC introduces into the proposed self-management design for scaling and stability purposes. Since HVC expands the clustering model hierarchically and virtually, a clusterhead (CH) node, positioned as a proxy for a specific cluster or grouped DCS nodes, can also operate in a micro-capacity as a peer member of an organized cluster in a higher tier. As the HVC promotional process continues through the hierarchy, each tier of the hierarchy exhibits emergent behavior. With HVC as the self-organizing structural framework, a multi-tiered, emergent architecture enables the decentralized management strategy to improve scaling objectives that traditionally challenge decentralized systems. The HVC organizational concept and the emergence properties align with and the view of the human brain's neocortex layering structure of sensory storage, prediction and intelligence. It is the position in this thesis, that for DCS to scale and maintain broad stability, network control and management must strive towards an emergent or natural approach. While today's models for network control and management have proven to lack scalability and responsiveness based on pure centralized models, it is unlikely that singular organizational models can withstand the operational complexities associated with DCS. In this work, we integrate emergence and learning-based methods in a cooperative computing manner towards realizing DCS self-management. However, unlike many existing work in these areas which break down with increased network complexity and dynamics, the proposed HVC framework is utilized to offset these issues through effective separation, aggregation and asynchronous processing of both distributed state and policy. Using modeling techniques, we demonstrate that such architecture is feasible and can improve the operational robustness of DCS. The modeling emphasis focuses on demonstrating the operational advantages of an HVC-based organizational strategy for emergent management services (i.e., reachability, availability or performance). By integrating the two approaches, the DCS architecture forms a scalable system to address the challenges associated with traditional decentralized systems. The hypothesis is that the emergent management system architecture will improve the operational scaling properties of DCS-based applications and services. Additionally, we demonstrate structural flexibility of HVC as an underlying service infrastructure to build and deploy DCS applications and layered services. The modeling results demonstrate that an HVC-based emergent management and control system operationally outperforms traditional structural organizational models. In summary, this thesis brings together the above contributions towards delivering a scalable, decentralized system for Internet mobile computing and communications