On the Catalyzing Effect of Randomness on the Per-Flow Throughput in Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the throughput capacity of a flow crossing a multi-hop wireless network, whose geometry is characterized by general randomness laws including Uniform, Poisson, Heavy-Tailed distributions for both the nodes' densities and the number of hops. The key contribution is to demonstrate \textit{how} the \textit{per-flow throughput} depends on the distribution of 1) the number of nodes $N_j$ inside hops' interference sets, 2) the number of hops $K$, and 3) the degree of spatial correlations. The randomness in both $N_j$'s and $K$ is advantageous, i.e., it can yield larger scalings (as large as $\Theta(n)$) than in non-random settings. An interesting consequence is that the per-flow capacity can exhibit the opposite behavior to the network capacity, which was shown to suffer from a logarithmic decrease in the presence of randomness. In turn, spatial correlations along the end-to-end path are detrimental by a logarithmic term

Towards a System Theoretic Approach to Wireless Network Capacity in Finite Time and Space

In asymptotic regimes, both in time and space (network size), the derivation of network capacity results is grossly simplified by brushing aside queueing behavior in non-Jackson networks. This simplifying double-limit model, however, lends itself to conservative numerical results in finite regimes. To properly account for queueing behavior beyond a simple calculus based on average rates, we advocate a system theoretic methodology for the capacity problem in finite time and space regimes. This methodology also accounts for spatial correlations arising in networks with CSMA/CA scheduling and it delivers rigorous closed-form capacity results in terms of probability distributions. Unlike numerous existing asymptotic results, subject to anecdotal practical concerns, our transient one can be used in practical settings: for example, to compute the time scales at which multi-hop routing is more advantageous than single-hop routing

Low-Latency Millimeter-Wave Communications: Traffic Dispersion or Network Densification?

This paper investigates two strategies to reduce the communication delay in future wireless networks: traffic dispersion and network densification. A hybrid scheme that combines these two strategies is also considered. The probabilistic delay and effective capacity are used to evaluate performance. For probabilistic delay, the violation probability of delay, i.e., the probability that the delay exceeds a given tolerance level, is characterized in terms of upper bounds, which are derived by applying stochastic network calculus theory. In addition, to characterize the maximum affordable arrival traffic for mmWave systems, the effective capacity, i.e., the service capability with a given quality-of-service (QoS) requirement, is studied. The derived bounds on the probabilistic delay and effective capacity are validated through simulations. These numerical results show that, for a given average system gain, traffic dispersion, network densification, and the hybrid scheme exhibit different potentials to reduce the end-to-end communication delay. For instance, traffic dispersion outperforms network densification, given high average system gain and arrival rate, while it could be the worst option, otherwise. Furthermore, it is revealed that, increasing the number of independent paths and/or relay density is always beneficial, while the performance gain is related to the arrival rate and average system gain, jointly. Therefore, a proper transmission scheme should be selected to optimize the delay performance, according to the given conditions on arrival traffic and system service capability

A Formal Framework for Modeling Trust and Reputation in Collective Adaptive Systems

Trust and reputation models for distributed, collaborative systems have been studied and applied in several domains, in order to stimulate cooperation while preventing selfish and malicious behaviors. Nonetheless, such models have received less attention in the process of specifying and analyzing formally the functionalities of the systems mentioned above. The objective of this paper is to define a process algebraic framework for the modeling of systems that use (i) trust and reputation to govern the interactions among nodes, and (ii) communication models characterized by a high level of adaptiveness and flexibility. Hence, we propose a formalism for verifying, through model checking techniques, the robustness of these systems with respect to the typical attacks conducted against webs of trust.Comment: In Proceedings FORECAST 2016, arXiv:1607.0200

Orion Routing Protocol for Delay-Tolerant Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of efficient routing in delay tolerant network. We propose a new routing protocol dubbed as ORION. In ORION, only a single copy of a data packet is kept in the network and transmitted, contact by contact, towards the destination. The aim of the ORION routing protocol is twofold: on one hand, it enhances the delivery ratio in networks where an end-to-end path does not necessarily exist, and on the other hand, it minimizes the routing delay and the network overhead to achieve better performance. In ORION, nodes are aware of their neighborhood by the mean of actual and statistical estimation of new contacts. ORION makes use of autoregressive moving average (ARMA) stochastic processes for best contact prediction and geographical coordinates for optimal greedy data packet forwarding. Simulation results have demonstrated that ORION outperforms other existing DTN routing protocols such as PRoPHET in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, hop count and first packet arrival

Security-Oriented Formal Techniques

Security of software systems is a critical issue in a world where Information Technology is becoming more and more pervasive. The number of services for everyday life that are provided via electronic networks is rapidly increasing, as witnessed by the longer and longer list of words with the prefix "e", such as e-banking, e-commerce, e-government, where the "e" substantiates their electronic nature. These kinds of services usually require the exchange of sensible data and the sharing of computational resources, thus needing strong security requirements because of the relevance of the exchanged information and the very distributed and untrusted environment, the Internet, in which they operate. It is important, for example, to ensure the authenticity and the secrecy of the exchanged messages, to establish the identity of the involved entities, and to have guarantees that the different system components correctly interact, without violating the required global properties