Towards Trustworthy, Efficient and Scalable Distributed Wireless Systems

Advances in wireless technologies have enabled distributed mobile devices to connect with each other to form distributed wireless systems. Due to the absence of infrastructure, distributed wireless systems require node cooperation in multi-hop routing. However, the openness and decentralized nature of distributed wireless systems where each node labors under a resource constraint introduces three challenges: (1) cooperation incentives that effectively encourage nodes to offer services and thwart the intentions of selfish and malicious nodes, (2) cooperation incentives that are efficient to deploy, use and maintain, and (3) routing to efficiently deliver messages with less overhead and lower delay. While most previous cooperation incentive mechanisms rely on either a reputation system or a price system, neither provides sufficiently effective cooperation incentives nor efficient resource consumption. Also, previous routing algorithms are not sufficiently efficient in terms of routing overhead or delay. In this research, we propose mechanisms to improve the trustworthiness, scalability, and efficiency of the distributed wireless systems. Regarding trustworthiness, we study previous cooperation incentives based on game theory models. We then propose an integrated system that combines a reputation system and a price system to leverage the advantages of both methods to provide trustworthy services. Analytical and simulation results show higher performance for the integrated system compared to the other two systems in terms of the effectiveness of the cooperation incentives and detection of selfish nodes. Regarding scalability in a large-scale system, we propose a hierarchical Account-aided Reputation Management system (ARM) to efficiently and effectively provide cooperation incentives with small overhead. To globally collect all node reputation information to accurately calculate node reputation information and detect abnormal reputation information with low overhead, ARM builds a hierarchical locality-aware Distributed Hash Table (DHT) infrastructure for the efficient and integrated operation of both reputation systems and price systems. Based on the DHT infrastructure, ARM can reduce the reputation management overhead in reputation and price systems. We also design a distributed reputation manager auditing protocol to detect a malicious reputation manager. The experimental results show that ARM can detect the uncooperative nodes that gain fraudulent benefits while still being considered as trustworthy in previous reputation and price systems. Also, it can effectively identify misreported, falsified, and conspiratorial information, providing accurate node reputations that truly reflect node behaviors. Regarding an efficient distributed system, we propose a social network and duration utility-based distributed multi-copy routing protocol for delay tolerant networks based on the ARM system. The routing protocol fully exploits node movement patterns in the social network to increase delivery throughput and decrease delivery delay while generating low overhead. The simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol outperforms the epidemic routing and spray and wait routing in terms of higher message delivery throughput, lower message delivery delay, lower message delivery overhead, and higher packet delivery success rate. The three components proposed in this dissertation research improve the trustworthiness, scalability, and efficiency of distributed wireless systems to meet the requirements of diversified distributed wireless applications

Performance of management solutions and cooperation approaches for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

A wide range of daily-life applications supported by vehicular networks attracted the interest, not only from the research community, but also from governments and the automotive industry. For example, they can be used to enable services that assist drivers on the roads (e.g., road safety, traffic monitoring), to spread commercial and entertainment contents (e.g., publicity), or to enable communications on remote or rural regions where it is not possible to have a common network infrastructure. Nonetheless, the unique properties of vehicular networks raise several challenges that greatly impact the deployment of these networks. Most of the challenges faced by vehicular networks arise from the highly dynamic network topology, which leads to short and sporadic contact opportunities, disruption, variable node density, and intermittent connectivity. This situation makes data dissemination an interesting research topic within the vehicular networking area, which is addressed by this study. The work described along this thesis is motivated by the need to propose new solutions to deal with data dissemination problems in vehicular networking focusing on vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs). To guarantee the success of data dissemination in vehicular networks scenarios it is important to ensure that network nodes cooperate with each other. However, it is not possible to ensure a fully cooperative scenario. This situation makes vehicular networks suitable to the presence of selfish and misbehavior nodes, which may result in a significant decrease of the overall network performance. Thus, cooperative nodes may suffer from the overwhelming load of services from other nodes, which comprises their performance. Trying to solve some of these problems, this thesis presents several proposals and studies on the impact of cooperation, monitoring, and management strategies on the network performance of the VDTN architecture. The main goal of these proposals is to enhance the network performance. In particular, cooperation and management approaches are exploited to improve and optimize the use of network resources. It is demonstrated the performance gains attainable in a VDTN through both types of approaches, not only in terms of bundle delivery probability, but also in terms of wasted resources. The results and achievements observed on this research work are intended to contribute to the advance of the state-of-the-art on methods and strategies for overcome the challenges that arise from the unique characteristics and conceptual design of vehicular networks.O vasto número de aplicações e cenários suportados pelas redes veiculares faz com que estas atraiam o interesse não só da comunidade científica, mas também dos governos e da indústria automóvel. A título de exemplo, estas podem ser usadas para a implementação de serviços e aplicações que podem ajudar os condutores dos veículos a tomar decisões nas estradas, para a disseminação de conteúdos publicitários, ou ainda, para permitir que existam comunicações em zonas rurais ou remotas onde não é possível ter uma infraestrutura de rede convencional. Contudo, as propriedades únicas das redes veiculares fazem com que seja necessário ultrapassar um conjunto de desafios que têm grande impacto na sua aplicabilidade. A maioria dos desafios que as redes veiculares enfrentam advêm da grande mobilidade dos veículos e da topologia de rede que está em constante mutação. Esta situação faz com que este tipo de rede seja suscetível de disrupção, que as oportunidades de contacto sejam escassas e de curta duração, e que a ligação seja intermitente. Fruto destas adversidades, a disseminação dos dados torna-se um tópico de investigação bastante promissor na área das redes veiculares e por esta mesma razão é abordada neste trabalho de investigação. O trabalho descrito nesta tese é motivado pela necessidade de propor novas abordagens para lidar com os problemas inerentes à disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares. Para garantir o sucesso da disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares é importante que este tipo de redes garanta a cooperação entre os nós da rede. Contudo, neste tipo de ambientes não é possível garantir um cenário totalmente cooperativo. Este cenário faz com que as redes veiculares sejam suscetíveis à presença de nós não cooperativos que comprometem seriamente o desempenho global da rede. Por outro lado, os nós cooperativos podem ver o seu desempenho comprometido por causa da sobrecarga de serviços que poderão suportar. Para tentar resolver alguns destes problemas, esta tese apresenta várias propostas e estudos sobre o impacto de estratégias de cooperação, monitorização e gestão de rede no desempenho das redes veiculares com ligações intermitentes (Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks - VDTNs). O objetivo das propostas apresentadas nesta tese é melhorar o desempenho global da rede. Em particular, as estratégias de cooperação e gestão de rede são exploradas para melhorar e optimizar o uso dos recursos da rede. Ficou demonstrado que o uso deste tipo de estratégias e metodologias contribui para um aumento significativo do desempenho da rede, não só em termos de agregados de pacotes (“bundles”) entregues, mas também na diminuição do volume de recursos desperdiçados. Os resultados observados neste trabalho procuram contribuir para o avanço do estado da arte em métodos e estratégias que visam ultrapassar alguns dos desafios que advêm das propriedades e desenho conceptual das redes veiculares

The Impact of Rogue Nodes on the Dependability of Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) are an extension to the classical Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) where the network is not dependent on any infrastructure (e.g. Access Points or centralized administrative nodes). OppNets can be more flexible than MANETs because an end to end path does not exist and much longer delays can be expected. Whereas a Rogue Access Point is typically immobile in the legacy infrastructure based networks and can have considerable impact on the overall connectivity, the research question in this project evaluates how the pattern and mobility of a rogue nodes impact the dependability and overall "Average Latency" in an Opportunistic Network Environment. We have simulated a subset of the mathematical modeling performed in a previous publication in this regard. Ad hoc networks are very challenging to model due to their mobility and intricate routing schemes. We strategically started our research by exploring the evolution of Opportunistic networks, and then implemented the rogue behavior by utilizing The ONE (Opportunistic Network Environment, by Nokia Research Centre) simulator to carry out our research over rogue behavior. The ONE simulator is an open source simulator developed in Java, simulating the layer 3 of the OSI model. The Rogue behavior is implemented in the simulator to observe the effect of rogue nodes. Finally we extracted the desired dataset to measure the latency by carefully simulating the intended behavior, keeping rest of the parameters (e.g. Node Movement Models, Signal Range and Strength, Point of Interest (POI) etc) unchanged. Our results are encouraging, and coincide with the average latency deterioration patterns as modeled by the previous researchers, with a few exceptions. The practical implementation of plug-in in ONE simulator has shown that only a very high degree of rogue nodes impact the latency, making OppNets more resilient and less vulnerable to malicious attacks

ReFIoV: a novel reputation framework for information-centric vehicular applications

In this article, a novel reputation framework for information-centric vehicular applications leveraging on machine learning and the artificial immune system (AIS), also known as ReFIoV, is proposed. Specifically, Bayesian learning and classification allow each node to learn as newly observed data of the behavior of other nodes become available and hence classify these nodes, meanwhile, the K-Means clustering algorithm allows to integrate recommendations from other nodes even if they behave in an unpredictable manner. AIS is used to enhance misbehavior detection. The proposed ReFIoV can be implemented in a distributed manner as each node decides with whom to interact. It provides incentives for nodes to cache and forward others’ mobile data as well as achieves robustness against false accusations and praise. The performance evaluation shows that ReFIoV outperforms state-of-the-art reputation systems for the metrics considered. That is, it presents a very low number of misbehaving nodes incorrectly classified in comparison to another reputation scheme. The proposed AIS mechanism presents a low overhead. The incorporation of recommendations enabled the framework to reduce even further detection time

Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications

Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection. In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m- Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes. This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments, called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile applications