On the feasibility of monitoring DTN: Impacts of fine tuning on routing protocols and the user experience

The “machine to machine” communication paradigm will become a central element for mobile networks. This paradigm can be easily constructed by a contact-based network, notably a disruption/delay tolerant networks (DTN). To characterize a DTN, we can use the Inter-contact time among the nodes. The better understanding of inter-contact time (ICT) has practical applications on the tuning of forwarding strategies, and hence in the quality of the User Experience. Nevertheless, the fine tuning of those parameters is tight to a set of assumptions about the regularity of movement or periodicity of patterns in an usually non complete and cumbersome statistical analysis. That is why in a dynamic environment where we cannot assume any previous information the tuning of parameters is usually overestimated. In this work we study how monitoring can help to adapt those parameters to give a better understanding of both natural evolution of the network and non periodical events

Distributed Hybrid Simulation of the Internet of Things and Smart Territories

This paper deals with the use of hybrid simulation to build and compose heterogeneous simulation scenarios that can be proficiently exploited to model and represent the Internet of Things (IoT). Hybrid simulation is a methodology that combines multiple modalities of modeling/simulation. Complex scenarios are decomposed into simpler ones, each one being simulated through a specific simulation strategy. All these simulation building blocks are then synchronized and coordinated. This simulation methodology is an ideal one to represent IoT setups, which are usually very demanding, due to the heterogeneity of possible scenarios arising from the massive deployment of an enormous amount of sensors and devices. We present a use case concerned with the distributed simulation of smart territories, a novel view of decentralized geographical spaces that, thanks to the use of IoT, builds ICT services to manage resources in a way that is sustainable and not harmful to the environment. Three different simulation models are combined together, namely, an adaptive agent-based parallel and distributed simulator, an OMNeT++ based discrete event simulator and a script-language simulator based on MATLAB. Results from a performance analysis confirm the viability of using hybrid simulation to model complex IoT scenarios.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0487

Computational Intelligence Inspired Data Delivery for Vehicle-to-Roadside Communications

We propose a vehicle-to-roadside communication protocol based on distributed clustering where a coalitional game approach is used to stimulate the vehicles to join a cluster, and a fuzzy logic algorithm is employed to generate stable clusters by considering multiple metrics of vehicle velocity, moving pattern, and signal qualities between vehicles. A reinforcement learning algorithm with game theory based reward allocation is employed to guide each vehicle to select the route that can maximize the whole network performance. The protocol is integrated with a multi-hop data delivery virtualization scheme that works on the top of the transport layer and provides high performance for multi-hop end-to-end data transmissions. We conduct realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the protocol over other approaches