Yes / The reliability of delivering packets through multi-hop intermediate nodes is a significant issue in the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The distributed mobile nodes establish connections to form the MANET, which may include selfish and misbehaving nodes. Recommendation based trust management has been proposed in the literature as a mechanism to filter out the misbehaving nodes while searching for a packet delivery route. However, building a trust model that relies on the recommendations from other nodes in the network is vulnerable to the possible dishonest behaviour, such as bad-mouthing, ballot-stuffing, and collusion, of the recommending nodes. . This paper investigates the problems of attacks posed by misbehaving nodes while propagating recommendations in the existing trust models. We propose a recommendation based trust model with a defence scheme that utilises clustering technique to dynamically filter attacks related to dishonest recommendations within certain time based on number of interactions, compatibility of information and node closeness. The model is empirically tested in several mobile and disconnected topologies in which nodes experience changes in their neighbourhoods and consequently face frequent route changes. The empirical analysis demonstrates robustness and accuracy of the trust model in a dynamic MANET environment.

Policy based network management is a promising approach for provisioning and management of quality of service in mobile ad hoc networks. In this thesis, we focus on performance evaluation of this approach in context of the amount of service received by certain nodes called policy execution points (PEPs) or policy clients from certain specialized nodes called the policy decision points (PDPs) or policy servers. We develop analytical models for the study of the system behavior under two scenarios; a simple Markovian scenario where we assume that the random variables associated with system processes follow an exponential distribution and a more complex non-Markovian scenario where we model the system processes according to general distribution functions as observed through simulation. We illustrate that the simplified Markovian model provides a reasonable indication of the trend of the service availability seen by policy clients and highlight the need for an exact analysis of the system without relying on Poisson assumptions for system processes. In the case of the more exact non-Markovian analysis, we show that our model gives a close approximation to the values obtained via empirical methods. Stochastic Petri Nets are used as performance evaluation tools in development and analysis of these system models. / Master of Science

With the proliferation of fairly powerful mobile devices and ubiquitous wireless technology, traditional mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) now migrate into a new era of service-oriented MANETs wherein a node can provide and receive service from other nodes it encounters and interacts with. This dissertation research concerns trust management and its applications for service-oriented MANETs to answer the challenges of MANET environments, including no centralized authority, dynamically changing topology, limited bandwidth and battery power, limited observations, unreliable communication, and the presence of malicious nodes who act to break the system functionality as well as selfish nodes who act to maximize their own gain. We propose a context-aware trust management model called CATrust for service-oriented ad hoc networks. The novelty of our design lies in the use of logit regression to dynamically estimate trustworthiness of a service provider based on its service behavior patterns in a context environment, treating channel conditions, node status, service payoff, and social disposition as 'context' information. We develop a recommendation filtering mechanism to effectively screen out false recommendations even in extremely hostile environments in which the majority recommenders are malicious. We demonstrate desirable convergence, accuracy, and resiliency properties of CATrust. We also demonstrate that CATrust outperforms contemporary peer-to-peer and Internet of Things trust models in terms of service trust prediction accuracy against collusion recommendation attacks. We validate the design of trust-based service management based on CATrust with a node-to-service composition and binding MANET application and a node-to-task assignment MANET application with multi-objective optimization (MOO) requirements. For either application, we propose a trust-based algorithm to effectively filter out malicious nodes exhibiting various attack behaviors by penalizing them with trust loss, which ultimately leads to high user satisfaction. Our trust-based algorithm is efficient with polynomial runtime complexity while achieving a close-to-optimal solution. We demonstrate that our trust-based algorithm built on CATrust outperforms a non-trust-based counterpart using blacklisting techniques and trust-based counterparts built on contemporary peer-to-peer trust protocols. We also develop a dynamic table-lookup method to apply the best trust model parameter settings upon detection of rapid MANET environment changes to maximize MOO performance. / Ph. D.

In urban search and rescue (USAR) operations, there is a considerable amount of danger faced by rescuers. The use of mobile robots can alleviate this issue. Coordinating the search effort is made more difficult by the communication issues typically faced in these environments, such that communication is often restricted. With small numbers of robots, it is necessary to break communication links in order to explore the entire environment. The robots can be viewed as a broken ad hoc network, relying on opportunistic contact in order to share data. In order to minimise overheads when exchanging data, a novel algorithm for data exchange has been created which maintains the propagation speed of flooding while reducing overheads. Since the rescue workers outside of the structure need to know the location of any victims, the task of finding their locations is two parted: 1) to locate the victims (Search Time), and 2) to get this data outside the structure (Delay Time). Communication with the outside is assumed to be performed by a static robot designated as the Command Station. Since it is unlikely that there will be sufficient robots to provide full communications coverage of the area, robots that discover victims are faced with the difficult decision of whether they should continue searching or return with the victim data. We investigate a variety of search techniques and see how the application of biological foraging models can help to streamline the search process, while we have also implemented an opportunistic network to ensure that data are shared whenever robots come within line of sight of each other or the Command Station. We examine this trade-off between performing a search and communicating the results.

<p>I många nätverk antas det att någon form av fix infrastruktur existerar och att nätverkets olika noder kan använda denna för att kommunicera med varandra. I ett ad hoc-nätverk antar man att det inte finns någon fix infrastruktur och att noderna måste använda varandra för att kunna kommunicera. Ett exempel på ett ad hoc-nätverk kan vara bärbara datorer sammankopplade med infraröda länkar under ett möte. När ad hoc-nätverket är mobilt innebär det att noderna rör sig.</p><p>I detta arbete har de tre protokollen Epidemic, GeoMean och GeoMove tillsammans med de två rörelsemodellerna Waypoint och den utökade slumpmässiga vandringen implementerats i en nyskriven simulator för denna typ av nätverk.</p><p>De två Geo-protokollen är nyutvecklade och syftar till att använda geografisk information för att underlätta kommunikationen i denna kategori av nätverk tillsammans med den nya utvidgade slumpmässiga vandringsmodellen.</p> / <p>In many networks, some kind of fix infrastructure is assumed to exist and the nodes of the network can use this infrastructure to communicate with each other. In an ad hoc network one assumes that there don't exist any kind of fix infrastructure and that the nodes must use each other to be able to communicate. One example of an ad hoc network could be laptops connected together with infrared links during a meeting. When an ad hoc network is mobile it implies that the nodes are moving.</p><p>In this work, the three protocols Epidemic, GeoMean and GeoMove together with the two mobility models Waypoint and Extended Random Walk, have been implemented in a newly written simulator for this kind of network.</p><p>The two Geo-protocols are newly developed and aim to use geographical information to aid communication in this category of networks together with the new Extended Random Walk model.</p>

<p>Internet and mobile communications have had a profound effect on today’s society. New services are constantly being deployed, in which an increasing amount of personal data is being processed in return for personally tailored services. Further, the use of electronic surveillance is increasing. There is the risk that honest citizens will have their privacy invaded for “the greater good”. We argue that it is of uttermost importance to retain the individuals’ control over their personal spheres.</p><p>One approach for enhancing the users’ privacy is to deploy technical measures for safeguarding privacy, so-called Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This thesis examines a set of PETs for enabling anonymous communication, so-called anonymous overlay networks,which eliminate the processing of personal data altogether by allowing the users act anonymously when communicating in a networked environment.</p><p>This thesis focuses mainly on mobile networks. These are of great interest because on the one hand they lay the groundwork for new innovative applications, but on the other hand they pose numerous novel challenges to privacy. This thesis describes the implementation</p><p>and performance evaluation of mCrowds – an anonymous overlay network for mobile Internet that enables anonymous browsing. It also describes the ongoing investigation on how to design anonymous overlay networks in order to make them suitable for mobile ad hoc</p><p>networks, a required building block for ambient intelligence.</p>

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without the support of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. There are many potential applications based the techniques of MANETs, such as disaster rescue, personal area networking, wireless conference, military applications, etc. MANETs face a number of challenges for designing a scalable routing protocol due to their natural characteristics. Guaranteeing delivery and the capability to handle dynamic connectivity are the most important issues for routing protocols in MANETs. In this dissertation, we will propose four algorithms that address different aspects of routing problems in MANETs. Firstly, in position based routing protocols to design a scalable location management scheme is inherently difficult. Enhanced Scalable Location management Service (EnSLS) is proposed to improve the scalability of existing location management services, and a mathematical model is proposed to compare the performance of the classical location service, GLS, and our protocol, EnSLS. The analytical model shows that EnSLS has better scalability compared with that of GLS. Secondly, virtual backbone routing can reduce communication overhead and speedup the routing process compared with many existing on-demand routing protocols for routing detection. In many studies, Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) is used to approximate virtual backbones in a unit-disk graph. However finding a MCDS is an NP-hard problem. In the dissertation, we develop two new pure localized protocols for calculating the CDS. One emphasizes forming a small size initial near-optimal CDS via marking process, and the other uses an iterative synchronized method to avoid illegal simultaneously removal of dominating nodes. Our new protocols largely reduce the number of nodes in CDS compared with existing methods. We show the efficiency of our approach through both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments. Finally, using multiple redundant paths for routing is a promising solution. However, selecting an optimal path set is an NP hard problem. We propose the Genetic Fuzzy Multi-path Routing Protocol (GFMRP), which is a multi-path routing protocol based on fuzzy set theory and evolutionary computing.

This thesis introduces LIFT, a combination of a cluster-based approach with a cross-layer scheme in order to discover services in MANET. In this proposal, High Capability Devices (HCD) are differentiated from Limited Capability Devices (LCD). HCD are set up as the cluster leaders in each cluster so as to perform most of the service discovery activities. Thus, LIFT manages local traffic instead of global traffic. Consequently, messages, energy, computing processes, and bandwidth were reduced due to the optimum usage of network resources. In order to know if LIFT achieves its goal to minimize resources, we have compared LIFT with another well-known solution (AODV-SD) in terms of control message overhead, energy consumption, PDR, throughput, hop count average, NRL, end-to-end delay, and service acquisition time. After carrying out many trials and simulations, LIFT improved previous results in the area. / La tesis presenta a LIFT, una solución para descubrir servicios en MANET que combina un enfoque basado en cluster con un esquema cross-layer. En esta propuesta se diferencian los dispositivos de capacidades superiores (HCD) de los dispositivos de capacidades limitadas (LCD). Los HCD se establecen como líderes en cada cluster para ejecutar la mayoría de las actividades de descubrimiento de servicios. De esta forma, LIFT maneja tráfico local en vez de tráfico global. Por tanto, se reduce el consumo de mensajes, energía y cómputo al hacer uso óptimo de los recursos de la red. Para saber si LIFT logra el objetivo de minimizar recursos, lo hemos comparado contra otra solución (AODV-SD) en aspectos como sobrecarga de paquetes de control, consumo de energía, PDR, throughput, promedio de saltos, NRL, retardo extremo a extremo y tiempo de adquisición de servicios. Después de muchas pruebas y simulaciones, LIFT mejora resultados anteriores en este campo

I många nätverk antas det att någon form av fix infrastruktur existerar och att nätverkets olika noder kan använda denna för att kommunicera med varandra. I ett ad hoc-nätverk antar man att det inte finns någon fix infrastruktur och att noderna måste använda varandra för att kunna kommunicera. Ett exempel på ett ad hoc-nätverk kan vara bärbara datorer sammankopplade med infraröda länkar under ett möte. När ad hoc-nätverket är mobilt innebär det att noderna rör sig. I detta arbete har de tre protokollen Epidemic, GeoMean och GeoMove tillsammans med de två rörelsemodellerna Waypoint och den utökade slumpmässiga vandringen implementerats i en nyskriven simulator för denna typ av nätverk. De två Geo-protokollen är nyutvecklade och syftar till att använda geografisk information för att underlätta kommunikationen i denna kategori av nätverk tillsammans med den nya utvidgade slumpmässiga vandringsmodellen. / In many networks, some kind of fix infrastructure is assumed to exist and the nodes of the network can use this infrastructure to communicate with each other. In an ad hoc network one assumes that there don't exist any kind of fix infrastructure and that the nodes must use each other to be able to communicate. One example of an ad hoc network could be laptops connected together with infrared links during a meeting. When an ad hoc network is mobile it implies that the nodes are moving. In this work, the three protocols Epidemic, GeoMean and GeoMove together with the two mobility models Waypoint and Extended Random Walk, have been implemented in a newly written simulator for this kind of network. The two Geo-protocols are newly developed and aim to use geographical information to aid communication in this category of networks together with the new Extended Random Walk model.

Thesis (MSc (Mathematical Sciences)--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, a pricing mechanism to stimulate cooperation between nodes in ad hoc networks is explored. The model incorporates incentives for users to act as transit nodes and carry the traffic between other nodes on multi-hop paths, and to be rewarded with their own ability to send traffic. The thesis investigates the consequences of this pricing model by means of simulation of a network and illustrates the way in which network resources are allocated to users according to their geographical position. Moreover, since modelling node movements is an important aspect in ad hoc network simulation, a collective mobility model, the adaptive mobility model, is used to maximise the area coverage of the nodes. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis word ’n koste meganisme gebruik om samewerking te stimuleer tussen nodusse in ad hoc netwerke. Die model inkorporeer trekpleisters deur gebruikers te beloon om verkeer te stuur deur op te tree as transito nodusse, en verkeer tussen nodusse op multi-skakel paaie te dra. Die tesis ondersoek die ge- volge van die koste model deur die simulering van ’n netwerk, en demonstreer die manier waarop die netwerk hulpbronne geallokeer word aan gebruikers gebaseer op hulle geografiese posisie. Siende dat die modellering van nodus bewegings ’n belangrike aspek is in ad hoc netwerk simulasie, word ’n kollek- tiewe mobiliteits model sowel as ’n veranderlike mobiliteits model gebruik om die dekkings areas van die nodusse te maksimeer.