Experimentation with MANETs of Smartphones

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively survey existing possibilities to build applications on top of ad-hoc smartphone networks for experimentation purposes, and introduce a taxonomy to classify them. We present AdHocDroid, an Android package that creates an IP-level MANET of (rooted) Android smartphones, and make it publicly available to the community. AdHocDroid supports standard TCP/IP applications, providing real smartphone IEEE 802.11 MANET and the capability to easily change the routing protocol. We tested our framework on several smartphones and a laptop. We validate the MANET running off-the-shelf applications, and reporting on experimental performance evaluation, including network metrics and battery discharge rate.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

A Survey on Multihop Ad Hoc Networks for Disaster Response Scenarios

Disastrous events are one of the most challenging applications of multihop ad hoc networks due to possible damages of existing telecommunication infrastructure.The deployed cellular communication infrastructure might be partially or completely destroyed after a natural disaster. Multihop ad hoc communication is an interesting alternative to deal with the lack of communications in disaster scenarios. They have evolved since their origin, leading to differentad hoc paradigms such as MANETs, VANETs, DTNs, or WSNs.This paper presents a survey on multihop ad hoc network paradigms for disaster scenarios.It highlights their applicability to important tasks in disaster relief operations. More specifically, the paper reviews the main work found in the literature, which employed ad hoc networks in disaster scenarios.In addition, it discusses the open challenges and the future research directions for each different ad hoc paradigm

Mobile Ad hoc Networking: Imperatives and Challenges

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) represent complex distributed systems that comprise wireless mobile nodes that can freely and dynamically self-organize into arbitrary and temporary, "ad-hoc" network topologies, allowing people and devices to seamlessly internetwork in areas with no pre-existing communication infrastructure, e.g., disaster recovery environments. Ad hoc networking concept is not a new one, having been around in various forms for over 20 years. Traditionally, tactical networks have been the only communication networking application that followed the ad hoc paradigm. Recently, the introduction of new technologies such as the Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11 and Hyperlan are helping enable eventual commercial MANET deployments outside the military domain. These recent evolutions have been generating a renewed and growing interest in the research and development of MANET. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of this dynamic field. It first explains the important role that mobile ad hoc networks play in the evolution of future wireless technologies. Then, it reviews the latest research activities in these areas, including a summary of MANET\u27s characteristics, capabilities, applications, and design constraints. The paper concludes by presenting a set of challenges and problems requiring further research in the future

WISE Abstraction Framework for Wireless Networks

Current wireless networks commonly consist of nodes with different capabilities (e.g., laptops and PDAs). Link quality such as link error rate and data transmit rate can differ widely. For efficient operation, the design of wireless networks must take into account such heterogeneity among nodes and wireless links. We present systematic approaches to overcome problems due to heterogeneous node capability and link quality in wireless networks. We first present a general framework called WISE (Wireless Integration Sublayer Extension) that abstracts specific details of low-level wireless communication technologies (e.g., modulation or backoff scheme). WISE provides a set of common primitives, based on which upper-level protocols can operate efficiently without knowing the underlying details. We also present a number of protocol extensions that employ the WISE framework to enhance the performance of specific upper-level protocols while hiding lower-level heterogeneity (e.g., link error rate). Our multihop WLAN architecture improves system performance by allowing client nodes to use multihop paths via other clients to reach an AP. Our geographic routing extension considers both location and link quality in the next hop selection, which leads to optimal paths under certain conditions. To address heterogeneity in node capability, we consider virtual routing backbone construction in two settings: cooperative and selfish. In the cooperative setting, we present a protocol extension that constructs an optimal backbone composed of a small number of high-capability nodes, which can be generalized to a more resilient backbone. For the selfish case, we use game theory and design an incentive-compatible backbone construction scheme. We evaluate our work from multiple perspectives. We use theoretical analysis to prove that our extensions lead to optimal solutions. We use simulations to experiment with our schemes in various scenarios and real-world implementation to understand the performance in practice. Our experiment results show that our schemes significantly outperform existing schemes

Game theory for collaboration in future networks

Cooperative strategies have the great potential of improving network performance and spectrum utilization in future networking environments. This new paradigm in terms of network management, however, requires a novel design and analysis framework targeting a highly flexible networking solution with a distributed architecture. Game Theory is very suitable for this task, since it is a comprehensive mathematical tool for modeling the highly complex interactions among distributed and intelligent decision makers. In this way, the more convenient management policies for the diverse players (e.g. content providers, cloud providers, home providers, brokers, network providers or users) should be found to optimize the performance of the overall network infrastructure. The authors discuss in this chapter several Game Theory models/concepts that are highly relevant for enabling collaboration among the diverse players, using different ways to incentivize it, namely through pricing or reputation. In addition, the authors highlight several related open problems, such as the lack of proper models for dynamic and incomplete information games in this area.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Mobile ad hoc networks for intelligent systems

Advances in wireless technology and portable computing along with demands for high user mobility have provided a major promotion toward the development of ad hoc networks. Mobile ad hoc networks feature dynamic topology, self-organization, limited bandwidth and battery power of a node. They do not rely on specialized routers for path discovery and traffic routing. Research on ad hoc networks has been extensively investigated in the past few years and related work has focused on many of the layers of the communications architecture. This research intends to investigate applications of MANET for intelligent systems, including intelligent transportation system (ITS), sensor network and mobile intelligent robot network, and propose some approaches to topology management, link layer multiple access and routing algorithms. Their performance is evaluated by theoretical analysis and off-the-shelf simulation tools. Most current research on ad hoc networks assumes the availability of IEEE 802.11. However, the RTS/CTS protocol of 802.11 still leads to packet collision which in turn decreases the network throughput and lifetime. For sensor networks, sensors are mostly battery operated. Hence, resolving packet collision may improve network lifetime by saving valuable power. Using space and network diversity combination, this work proposes a new packet separation approach to packet collision caused by masked nodes. Inter-vehicle communication is a key component of ITS and it is also called vehicular ad hoc network. VANET has many features different from regular MANETs in terms of mobility, network size and connectivity. Given rapid topology changes and network partitioning, this work studies how to organize the numerous vehicular nodes and establish message paths between any pair of vehicular nodes if they are not apart too far away. In urban areas, the inter-vehicle communication has different requirements and constraints than highway environments. The proposed position-based routing strategy for VANETs utilizes the traffic pattern in city environments. Packets are forwarded based on traffic lights timing sequence and the moving direction of relaying vehicles. A multicast protocol is also introduced to visualize the real time road traffic with customized scale. Only vehicles related to a source node\u27s planned trajectory will reply the query packet. The visualized real time traffic information therefore helps the driver make better decision in route planning when traffic congestion happens. Nowadays robots become more and more powerful and intelligent. They can take part in operations in a cooperative manner which makes distributed control necessary. Ad hoc robot communication network is still fresh field for researchers working on networking technology. This work investigates some key issues in robot ad hoc network and evaluate the challenges while establishing robot ad hoc networks

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