Information-centric communication in mobile and wireless networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm that has been proposed to cope with drawbacks of host-based communication protocols, namely scalability and security. In this thesis, we base our work on Named Data Networking (NDN), which is a popular ICN architecture, and investigate NDN in the context of wireless and mobile ad hoc networks. In a first part, we focus on NDN efficiency (and potential improvements) in wireless environments by investigating NDN in wireless one-hop communication, i.e., without any routing protocols. A basic requirement to initiate informationcentric communication is the knowledge of existing and available content names. Therefore, we develop three opportunistic content discovery algorithms and evaluate them in diverse scenarios for different node densities and content distributions. After content names are known, requesters can retrieve content opportunistically from any neighbor node that provides the content. However, in case of short contact times to content sources, content retrieval may be disrupted. Therefore, we develop a requester application that keeps meta information of disrupted content retrievals and enables resume operations when a new content source has been found. Besides message efficiency, we also evaluate power consumption of information-centric broadcast and unicast communication. Based on our findings, we develop two mechanisms to increase efficiency of information-centric wireless one-hop communication. The first approach called Dynamic Unicast (DU) avoids broadcast communication whenever possible since broadcast transmissions result in more duplicate Data transmissions, lower data rates and higher energy consumption on mobile nodes, which are not interested in overheard Data, compared to unicast communication. Hence, DU uses broadcast communication only until a content source has been found and then retrieves content directly via unicast from the same source. The second approach called RC-NDN targets efficiency of wireless broadcast communication by reducing the number of duplicate Data transmissions. In particular, RC-NDN is a Data encoding scheme for content sources that increases diversity in wireless broadcast transmissions such that multiple concurrent requesters can profit from each others’ (overheard) message transmissions. If requesters and content sources are not in one-hop distance to each other, requests need to be forwarded via multi-hop routing. Therefore, in a second part of this thesis, we investigate information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. First, we consider multi-hop broadcast communication in the context of rather static community networks. We introduce the concept of preferred forwarders, which relay Interest messages slightly faster than non-preferred forwarders to reduce redundant duplicate message transmissions. While this approach works well in static networks, the performance may degrade in mobile networks if preferred forwarders may regularly move away. Thus, to enable routing in mobile ad hoc networks, we extend DU for multi-hop communication. Compared to one-hop communication, multi-hop DU requires efficient path update mechanisms (since multi-hop paths may expire quickly) and new forwarding strategies to maintain NDN benefits (request aggregation and caching) such that only a few messages need to be transmitted over the entire end-to-end path even in case of multiple concurrent requesters. To perform quick retransmission in case of collisions or other transmission errors, we implement and evaluate retransmission timers from related work and compare them to CCNTimer, which is a new algorithm that enables shorter content retrieval times in information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. Yet, in case of intermittent connectivity between requesters and content sources, multi-hop routing protocols may not work because they require continuous end-to-end paths. Therefore, we present agent-based content retrieval (ACR) for delay-tolerant networks. In ACR, requester nodes can delegate content retrieval to mobile agent nodes, which move closer to content sources, can retrieve content and return it to requesters. Thus, ACR exploits the mobility of agent nodes to retrieve content from remote locations. To enable delay-tolerant communication via agents, retrieved content needs to be stored persistently such that requesters can verify its authenticity via original publisher signatures. To achieve this, we develop a persistent caching concept that maintains received popular content in repositories and deletes unpopular content if free space is required. Since our persistent caching concept can complement regular short-term caching in the content store, it can also be used for network caching to store popular delay-tolerant content at edge routers (to reduce network traffic and improve network performance) while real-time traffic can still be maintained and served from the content store

Exploiting rush hours for energy-efficient contact probing in opportunistic data collection

In many potential wireless sensor network applications, the cost of the base station infrastructure can be prohibitive. Instead, we consider the use of mobile devices carried by people in their daily life to collect sensor data opportunistically. As the movement of these mobile nodes is, by definition, uncontrolled, contact probing becomes a challenging task, particularly for sensor nodes which need to be aggressively duty-cycled to achieve long life. It has been reported that when the duty-cycle of a sensor node is fixed, SNIP, a sensor node-initiated probing mechanism, performs much better than mobile node-initiated probing mechanisms. Considering that the intended applications are delay-tolerant, mobile nodes tend to follow some repeated mobility patterns, and contacts are distributed unevenly in temporal, SNIP-RH is proposed in this paper to further improve the performance of contact probing through exploiting Rush Hours during which contacts arrive more frequently. In SNIP-RH, SNIP is activated only when the time is within Rush Hours and there are enough data to be uploaded in the next probed contact. As for the duty-cycle, it is selected based on the mean of contact length that is learned on line. Both analysis and simulation results indicate that under a typical simulated road-side wireless sensor network scenario, SNIP-RH can significantly reduce the energy consumed for probing the contacts, that are necessary for uploading the sensed data, or significantly increase the probed contact capacity under a sensor node's energy budget for contact probing

A shared opportunistic infrastructure for long-lived wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a Shared Opportunistic Infrastructure (SOI) is proposed to reduce total cost of ownership for long-lived wireless sensor networks through exploiting human mobility. More specifically, various sensor nodes are opportunistically connected with their corresponding servers through smart phones carried by people in their daily life. In this paper, we will introduce the motivations, present the architecture, discuss the feasibility, and identify several research opportunities of SOI

SNIP: A Sensor Node-Initiated Probing mechanism for opportunistic data collection in sparse wireless sensor networks

In many potential wireless sensor network applications, the cost of the base station infrastructure can be prohibitive. Instead, we consider the opportunistic use of mobile devices carried by people in daily life to collect sensor data. As the movement of these mobile nodes is by definition uncontrolled, contact probing is a challenging task, particularly for sensor nodes which need to be duty-cycled to achieve long life. We propose a Sensor Node-Initiated Probing mechanism for improving the contact capacity when the duty cycle of a sensor node is fixed. In contrast to existing mobile node-initiated probing mechanisms, in which the mobile node broadcasts a beacon periodically, in SNIP the sensor node broadcasts a beacon each time its radio is turned on according to its duty cycle. We study SNIP through both analysis and network simulation. The evaluation results indicate that SNIP performs much better than mobile-initiated probing. When the fixed duty cycle is lower than 1%, the probed contact capacity can be increased by an order of 2-10; alternatively, SNIP can achieve the same amount of probed contact capacity with much less energy consumption

A Taxonomy on Misbehaving Nodes in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are type of Intermittently Connected Networks (ICNs) featured by long delay, intermittent connectivity, asymmetric data rates and high error rates. DTNs have been primarily developed for InterPlanetary Networks (IPNs), however, have shown promising potential in challenged networks i.e. DakNet, ZebraNet, KioskNet and WiderNet. Due to unique nature of intermittent connectivity and long delay, DTNs face challenges in routing, key management, privacy, fragmentation and misbehaving nodes. Here, misbehaving nodes i.e. malicious and selfish nodes launch various attacks including flood, packet drop and fake packets attack, inevitably overuse scarce resources (e.g., buffer and bandwidth) in DTNs. The focus of this survey is on a review of misbehaving node attacks, and detection algorithms. We firstly classify various of attacks depending on the type of misbehaving nodes. Then, detection algorithms for these misbehaving nodes are categorized depending on preventive and detective based features. The panoramic view on misbehaving nodes and detection algorithms are further analyzed, evaluated mathematically through a number of performance metrics. Future directions guiding this topic are also presented

Contact probing mechanisms for opportunistic sensor data collection in sparse wireless sensor networks

In many emerging wireless sensor network scenarios, the use of a fixed infrastructure of base stations for data collection is either infeasible, or prohibitive in terms of deployment and maintenance costs. Instead, we consider the use of mobile devices (i.e. smartphones) carried by people in their daily life to collect data from sensor nodes opportunistically. As the movement of these mobile nodes is, by definition, not controlled for the purpose of data collection, synchronization through contact probing becomes a challenging task, particularly for sensor nodes, which need to be aggressively duty-cycled to conserve energy and achieve long lifetimes. This paper formulates this important problem, providing an analytical solution framework and systematically investigating the effective use of contact probing for opportunistic data collection. We present two new solutions, Sensor Node-Initiated Probing (SNIP) and SNIP-Rush Hours, the latter taking advantage of the temporal locality of human mobility. These schemes are evaluated using numerical analysis and COOJA network simulations, and the results are validated on a small sensor testbed and with the real-world human mobility traces from Nokia MDC Dataset. Our experimental results quantify the relative performance of alternative solutions on sensor node energy consumption and the efficacy of contact probing for data collection, allowing us to offer insights on this important emerging problem

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications