Design and performance study of algorithms for consensus in sparse, mobile ad-hoc networks

PhD ThesisMobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-organizing wireless networks that consist of mobile wireless devices (nodes). These networks operate without the aid of any form of supporting infrastructure, and thus need the participating nodes to co-operate by forwarding each other’s messages. MANETs can be deployed when urgent temporary communications are required or when installing network infrastructure is considered too costly or too slow, for example in environments such as battlefields, crisis management or space exploration. Consensus is central to several applications including collaborative ones which a MANET can facilitate for mobile users. This thesis solves the consensus problem in a sparse MANET in which a node can at times have no other node in its wireless range and useful end-to-end connectivity between nodes can just be a temporary feature that emerges at arbitrary intervals of time for any given node pair. Efficient one-to-many dissemination, essential for consensus, now becomes a challenge: enough number of destinations cannot deliver a multicast unless nodes retain the multicast message for exercising opportunistic forwarding. Seeking to keep storage and bandwidth costs low, we propose two protocols. An eventually relinquishing (}RC) protocol that does not store messages for long is used for attempting at consensus, and an eventually quiescent (}QC) one that stops forwarding messages after a while is used for concluding consensus. Use of }RC protocol poses additional challenges for consensus, when the fraction, f n, of nodes that can crash is: 1 4 f n < 1 2 . Consensus latency and packet overhead are measured through simulation indicating that they are not too high to be feasible in MANETs. They both decrease considerably even for a modest increase in network density.Damascus University

Protocolos de pertenencia a grupos para entornos dinámicos

Los sistemas distribuidos gozan hoy de fundamental importancia entre los sistemas de información, debido a sus potenciales capacidades de tolerancia a fallos y escalabilidad, que permiten su adecuación a las aplicaciones actuales, crecientemente exigentes. Por otra parte, el desarrollo de aplicaciones distribuidas presenta también dificultades específicas, precisamente para poder ofrecer la escalabilidad, tolerancia a fallos y alta disponibilidad que constituyen sus ventajas. Por eso es de gran utilidad contar con componentes distribuidas específicamente diseñadas para proporcionar, a más bajo nivel, un conjunto de servicios bien definidos, sobre los cuales las aplicaciones de más alto nivel puedan construir su propia semántica más fácilmente. Es el caso de los servicios orientados a grupos, de uso muy extendido por las aplicaciones distribuidas, a las que permiten abstraerse de los detalles de las comunicaciones. Tales servicios proporcionan primitivas básicas para la comunicación entre dos miembros del grupo o, sobre todo, las transmisiones de mensajes a todo el grupo, con garantías concretas. Un caso particular de servicio orientado a grupos lo constituyen los servicios de pertenencia a grupos, en los cuales se centra esta tesis. Los servicios de pertenencia a grupos proporcionan a sus usuarios una imagen del conjunto de procesos o máquinas del sistema que permanecen simultáneamente conectados y correctos. Es más, los diversos participantes reciben esta información con garantías concretas de consistencia. Así pues, los servicios de pertenencia constituyen una componente fundamental para el desarrollo de sistemas de comunicación a grupos y otras aplicaciones distribuidas. El problema de pertenencia a grupos ha sido ampliamente tratado en la literatura tanto desde un punto de vista teórico como práctico, y existen múltiples realizaciones de servicios de pertenencia utilizables. A pesar de ello, la definición del problema no es única. Por el contrario, dependienBañuls Polo, MDC. (2006). Protocolos de pertenencia a grupos para entornos dinámicos [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/1886Palanci

Design and implementation of a protocol for safe cooperation of self-driving cars

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitetura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2019Ever since its introduction, the car has fundamentally changed our society. Its popularity grew tremendously in the early 20th century, and today it is nearly ubiquitous. However, there are several problems related to automobiles, one of the major ones being road congestion. Drivers lose millions of dollars every year in fuel costs and time spent in day to day traffic congestion. Another major problem is emissions from vehicles, forming a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. Automated driving systems currently rely on their own sensors to gather information from the real-world, and make informed decisions to keep their passengers safe. But sensors may not be sufficiently accurate during all conditions and can even fail, so automated driving systems take this into consideration when controlling the car, leading to larger safety margins. Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication can enable cooperation between vehicles which, among other things, can be sending or receiving information from other nearby vehicles, increasing the confidence level in the information gathered or even gathering information otherwise not obtainable. Cooperation opens the door to complex vehicular applications such as road-trains (or platooning) and virtual traffic lights, both of which have the potential to mitigate the problems mentioned before. These applications have tight safety requirements due to the context in which they operate: vehicles, possibly with human occupants, operating on roads traversed by non-autonomous vehicles and pedestrians. In this MSc Dissertation, we describe the implementation of a vehicular cooperation algorithm backed by both vehicle-to-vehicle communication and a cloud membership service. We then evaluate the implemented algorithm in a cooperative environment to conclude about its correctness, making use of the Robot Operating System middleware to implement a simulation and visualize a maneuver executed using the algorithm

ReSCon '11, Research Student Conference: Book of Abstracts

The fourth SED Research Student Conference (ReSCon2011) was hosted over three days, 20-22 June 2011, in the Hamilton Centre at Brunel University. The conference consisted of technical presentations, a poster session and social events. which focused on current research being conducted within the School of Engineering and Design by postgraduate research students from the School. The conference is held annually, and ReSCon plays a key role in contributing to research and innovations within the School

Design and evaluation of crash tolerant protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks are wireless networks operating without any form of supporting infrastructure such as base-stations, and thus require the participating nodes to co-operate by forwarding each other's messages. Ad-hoc networks can be deployed when installing network infrastructure is considered too expensive, too cumbersome or simply too slow, for example in domains such as battlefields, search-and-rescue or space exploration. Tolerating node crashes and transient network partitions is likely to be important in such domains. However, developing applications which do so is a difficult task, a task which can be made easier by the availability of fault-tolerant protocols and middleware. This dissertation studies two core fault-tolerant primitives, reliable dissemination and consensus, and presents two families of protocols which implement these primitives in a wide range of mobile ad-hoc networks. The performance of the protocols is studied through simulation indicating that they are able to provide their guarantees in a bandwidth efficient manner. This is achieved by taking advantage of the broadcast nature and variable message delivery latencies inherent in ad-hoc networks. To illustrate the usefulness of these two primitives, a design for a distributed, fault-tolerant tuple space suitable to implement on mobile ad-hoc networks is presented. This design, if implemented, would provide a simple, yet powerful abstraction to the developer of fault-tolerant applications in mobile ad-hoc networks.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Achieving fault-tolerant consensus in ad hoc networks

Tese de mestrado em Engenharia Informática (Arquitectura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2013Consensus plays a fundamental role in distributed systems. This operation consists in having every process in a distributed system, or a subset of processes, to agree upon a value that was proposed by any of the processes. Consensus is used to solve several problems in distributed systems computation, such as: state machine replication, leader election and atomic broadcast, allowing the coordination of the network. Its applicability becomes more important and difficult to implement in wireless ad hoc networks that are vulnerable to intrusions. When dealing with a wireless ad hoc network, specially one composed by mobile devices that are constantly moving, there are several obstacles that have to be overcome such as the unreliability in the communication, the hardware limitations of the devices, the limited communication range and the exposure to malicious users. The project consists in the design, implementation, test and analysis of Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols for wireless ad hoc networks. It is assumed that the number of participants is unknown and the consensus protocols execute in a group of processes called sink. The protocols are byzantine fault-tolerant and circumvent both FLP and Santoro-Widmayer impossibility results. Three forms of consensus protocols were considered: binary, multivalued and vector. The protocols were organized in a stack, where lower level protocols were used to build higher ones. The stack was implemented as a library and was tested in a simulation environment. Some preliminary tests were also performed with Android devices. The evaluation of the protocols shows that they exhibit good performance in several scenarios and even under attack.O consenso tem um papel fundamental em sistemas distribuídos. Esta operação consiste em ter todos os processos num sistema distribuído, ou um subconjunto de processos, a acordar num valor que foi proposto por algum dos processos. O consenso é usado para resolver vários problemas na computação de um sistema distribuído, como por exemplo: máquina de estados replicada, eleição de líder e difusão atómica, permitindo a coordenação da rede. A sua utilidade torna-se mais importante e difícil de implementar em redes ad hoc móveis sem fios que estão vulneráveis a intrusões. Quando se está a lidar com uma rede ad hoc sem fios, especialmente uma composta por dispositivos móveis que apresentam uma mobilidade constante, existe um conjunto de obstáculos relacionados com a falta de fiabilidade na comunicação, as limitações dos equipamentos, o seu reduzido alcance de comunicação e a exposição¸ ao a utilizadores mal intencionados. O projecto consiste no desenho, implementação, teste e análise de protocolos de consenso tolerantes a faltas bizantinas para redes ad hoc sem fios. ´E assumido que o número de participantes é desconhecido e os protocolos de consenso são executados num grupo de processos denominado poço. Os protocolos são tolerantes a faltas bizantinas e contornam os resultados de impossibilidade de FLP e de Santoro-Widmayer. Foram considerados três tipos de protocolos de consenso: binário, multi-valor e vector. Os protocolos estão organizados numa pilha, onde protocolos de baixo nível foram usados para construir os protocolos de níveis superiores. A pilha foi implementada como uma biblioteca e foi testada em ambiente de simulação. Alguns testes preliminares foram também efectuados com dispositivos Android. A avaliação dos protocolos revela que estes exibem um bom desempenho em vários cenários e mesmo sobre ataque

Communication Algorithms for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In this dissertation we present deterministic algorithms for reliable and efficient communication in ad hoc networks. In the first part of this dissertation we give a specification for a reliable neighbor discovery layer for mobile ad hoc networks. We present two different algorithms that implement this layer with varying progress guarantees. In the second part of this dissertation we give an algorithm which allows nodes in a mobile wireless ad hoc network to communicate reliably and at the same time maintain local neighborhood information. In the last part of this dissertation we look at the distributed trigger counting problem in the wireless ad hoc network setting. We present a deterministic algorithm for this problem which is communication efficient in terms of the the maximum number of messages received by any processor in the system

Formal Modeling and Analysis of Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Fokkink, W.J. [Promotor]Luttik, S.P. [Copromotor