Routing in Mobile Phone Ad Hoc Networks

The advancement of mobile phones is creating cheaper and more powerful devices that are capable of providing networking services using readily available technologies embedded on mobile phones. Networking services are usually provided using fixed cellular infrastructure owned by Cellular Network Providers. The use of the cellular infrastructure incurs the cost of data exchange. One way to eliminate costs is to create spontaneous ad hoc networks that allow mobile phone users to connect directly and share information using technologies such as Bluetooth. In order to efficiently share information, routing techniques are needed that efficiently use the resources in these networks. This paper presents the design of a mobile phone ad hoc network and a prototype system that uses established routing algorithms to determine which routing protocols are well suited for such a network

A study of mobile phone ad hoc networks via bluetooth with different routing protocols

The growth of mobile computing is changing the way people communicate. Mobile devices, especially mobile phones, have become cheaper and more powerful, and are able to run more applications and provide networking services. Mobile phones use fixed cellular infrastructure such as base stations and transmission towers to enable users to share multimedia content and access the internet at any time or place. However, using the internet is costly. Therefore, one of the solutions is to create impromptu ad hoc networks to share information among users. Such networks are infrastructureless and self-organising, much like mobile ad hoc networks. This dissertation therefore investigates how mobile phones with low-power Bluetooth technology can be used to create ad hoc networks that connect mobile phones and allow them to share information. The mobile phones should be able organise themselves for multi-hop communication. Routing becomes important in order to achieve effciency in data communication. Several existing routing protocols were developed and evaluated for this network to determine how effciently they deliver data and deal with network disruptions such as a device moving out of transmission range. Representative routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networking, peer-to-peer networks and publish/subscribe systems were evaluated according to performance metrics defidened in the research, namely total traffc, data traffc, control traffc, delay, convergence time, and positive response. Prototypes for Nokia phones were developed and tested in a small ad hoc network. For practical networking setup, a simple routing protocol that uses the limited mobile phone resources effciently would be better than a sophisticated routing protocol that keeps routing information about the network participants

Opportunistic data dissemination in mobile phone sensor networks

Situated communication technologies in emergencies are subject to decay or fail because of their inadequate services. With the advances in tiny-sensor technologies and ubiquity of smart phones, public awareness on urgent situations can be raised in more efficient and distributed ways. We center on opportunistic data dissemination schemes where the objective is to provide an operability among sensing, communication, and data spread. Such mobile networks do not require end-to-end routes or servers; however connectivity and scalability issues may last forever without determinism. We have started implementing context-aware services to understand the mobile phone carriers’ characteristics and routines in order to increase the quality of service in our collaboration and dissemination objectives. We are currently working on real implementation of mobile ad hoc networks and routing algorithms. Besides, we simulate an urban city network with different scenarios and objectives to analyze the open research challenges

Moving Targets: Geographically Routed Human Movement Networks

We introduce a new communication paradigm, Human-to-human Mobile Ad hoc Networking (HuManet), that exploits smartphone capabilities and human behavior to create decentralized networks for smartphone-to-smartphone message delivery. HuManets support stealth command-and-control messaging for mobile BotNets, covert channels in the presence of an observer who monitors all cellular communication, and distributed protocols for querying the state or content of targeted mobile devices. In this paper, we introduce techniques for constructing HumaNets and describe protocols for efficiently routing and addressing messages. In contrast to flooding or broadcast schemes that saturate the network and aggressively consume phone resources (e.g., batteries), our protocols exploit human mobility patterns to significantly increase communication efficiency while limiting the exposure of HuManets to mobile service providers. Our techniques leverage properties of smartphones – in particular, their highly synchronized clocks and ability to discern location information – to construct location profiles for each device. HuManets’ fully-distributed and heuristic-based routing protocols route messages towards phones with location profiles that are similar to those of the intended receiver, enabling efficient message delivery with limited effects to end-to-end latency

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

Towards Opportunistic Data Dissemination in Mobile Phone Sensor Networks

Recently, there has been a growing interest within the research community in developing opportunistic routing protocols. Many schemes have been proposed; however, they differ greatly in assumptions and in type of network for which they are evaluated. As a result, researchers have an ambiguous understanding of how these schemes compare against each other in their specific applications. To investigate the performance of existing opportunistic routing algorithms in realistic scenarios, we propose a heterogeneous architecture including fixed infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, and mobile nodes. The proposed architecture focuses on how to utilize the available, low cost short-range radios of mobile phones for data gathering and dissemination. We also propose a new realistic mobility model and metrics. Existing opportunistic routing protocols are simulated and evaluated with the proposed heterogeneous architecture, mobility models, and transmission interfaces. Results show that some protocols suffer long time-to-live (TTL), while others suffer short TTL. We show that heterogeneous sensor network architectures need heterogeneous routing algorithms, such as a combination of Epidemic and Spray and Wait