MobileMAN: Mobile Metropolitan Ad hoc Networks

The project aims to define and develop a metropolitan area, self-organizing and totally wireless network that we call Mobile Metropolitan Ad-hoc Network (MobileMAN). In a MobileMAN the users device are the network, no infrastructure is strictly required. A MobileMAN is finalized at providing, at a low cost and where and when is needed, the communication and interaction platform for people inside a man. It will support a kind of citizens network by which people could avoid the operators infrastructure (communication costs), thus increasing the society communication. Moreover, it has a very low cost-barrier for deploying a service on an experimental or temporary basis. This agility is especially important because it is not yet clear what services, business models and social behaviours are going to prove successful in a future pervasive computing environment

Towards a Novel Transport Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract. The TCP protocol exhibits poor performance in multi-hop Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). The ultimate reason for this is that MANETs behave in a significantly different way from traditional wired networks (like the Internet) for which the TCP protocol was originally designed. In particular, route failures and route changes due to node mobility may be frequent events in MANETs. Furthermore, congestion phenomena in MANETs are essentially different from traditional wired networks. In this paper we propose a novel transport protocol for MANETs. Unlike other proposals, our protocol is not a modification of the TCP but is specifically tailored to the characteristics of the MANET environment. It is able to manage efficiently route changes and route failures. Furthermore, it includes a completely re-designed congestion control mechanism. Finally, it is designed in such a way to reduce as much as possible the number of useless retransmissions. This is extremely important since retransmissions consume energy