Currently there is ongoing research in the field of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) for several different scenarios. Research has focused on topology related challenges such as routing mechanisms or addressing systems, as well as security issues like traceability of radio communication or encryption. In addition, there are very specific research interests such as the effects of directional antennas for MANETs or optimized transmission techniques for minimal power consumption or range optimization. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in general, need wireless systems in order to communicate. Current UAS are very flexible and allow for a wide spectrum of mission profiles by means of utilizing different UAVs, according to the requirements at hand. Each mission poses special needs and requirements on the internal and external UAS communication and special mission scenarios calling for UAV swarms increase the complexity and require specialized communication solutions. UAS have specific needs not provided by the general research, but are, on the other hand, to diversified to make much use of narrowly focused developments; UAS form a sufficiently large research area for application of MANETs to be considered as an independent group with specialized needs worthy of tailored implementations of MANET principles. MANET research has not tackled a general approach to UAS although some sources show specific applications involving UAVS. This work presents some new aspects for the development of of ad-hoc wireless networks for UAVs and UAS and focuses on their specialties and needs. A general framework for MANET development is proposed. Furthermore, the proposed specific evaluation scenarios provide for a UAS focused comparison of MANET performance.

Distributed systems like e-commerce and e-market places, peer-to-peer networks, social networks, and mobile ad hoc networks require cooperation among the participating entities to guarantee the formation and sustained existence of network services. The reliability of interactions among anonymous entities is a significant issue in such environments. The distributed entities establish connections to interact with others, which may include selfish and misbehaving entities and result in bad experiences. Therefore, trustworthiness evaluation using trust management techniques has become a significant issue in securing these environments to allow entities decide on the reliability and trustworthiness of other entities, besides it helps coping with defection problems and stimulating entities to cooperate. Recent models on evaluating trustworthiness in distributed systems have heavily focused on assessing trustworthiness of entities and isolate misbehaviours based on single trust metrics. Less effort has been put on the investigation of the subjective nature and differences in the way trustworthiness is perceived to produce a composite multidimensional trust metrics to overcome the limitation of considering single trust metric. In the light of this context, this thesis concerns the evaluation of entities’ trustworthiness by the design and investigation of trust metrics that are computed using multiple properties of trust and considering environment. Based on the concept of probabilistic theory of trust management technique, this thesis models trust systems and designs cooperation techniques to evaluate trustworthiness in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A recommendation based trust model with multi-parameters filtering algorithm, and multidimensional metric based on social and QoS trust model are proposed to secure MANETs. Effectiveness of each of these models in evaluating trustworthiness and discovering misbehaving nodes prior to interactions, as well as their influence on the network performance has been investigated. The results of investigating both the trustworthiness evaluation and the network performance are promising.

The increasing growth of mobile devices in the whole world, and the forecasts for the coming years has been indicated by several reports. Nonetheless, this need for ubiquitous collaboration has brought new possibilities and challenges to the scientific community. Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) emerges in this scenario allowing devices to interconnect autonomously, without the need of a fixed infrastructure, in order to provide communication and information services. Due to such decentralization and the natural constraints of mobile devices, it remains, to this day, a challenge to provide efficient routing for MANETs. In this dissertation we propose new routing enhancements based on policies for MANETs running the HTR protocol. We consider the role(s) a user associated to a device performs within an organization. Hence our policies can guide the routing based on these roles. With this scheme we improve communication according to different business needs and scenario requirements. To this end, we propose a set of policies that affects the routing behavior and present four case studies to present each policy. Then we analyze two policies in terms of end-to-end delay, and nodes’ lifetime. Through simulation we evaluate these metrics while varying parameters such as the amount of nodes participating in the network, the mobility characteristics, and the number of traffic sources. Our results show that it is possible to achieve these goals without causing great impact on the average end-to-end delay and energy consumption, two important metrics in any MANET evaluation. We explore the results in several scenarios and detail our findings, which can provide a different perspective for future MANET applications. / Submitted by João Arthur Martins (joao.arthur@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-10T18:42:15Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação Gabriela Coutinho.pdf: 1701782 bytes, checksum: 113328c2efdd1ba97f7a237d03cab574 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-11T17:46:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação Gabriela Coutinho.pdf: 1701782 bytes, checksum: 113328c2efdd1ba97f7a237d03cab574 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-09-13 / O crescimento das vendas de aparelhos móveis em todo o mundo, bem como as previsões para os próximos anos são apontadas em diversos relatórios. No entanto, essa necessidade de colaboração ubíqua trouxe novas possibilidades e desafios para a comunidade científica. Redes móveis ad hoc (Mobile Ad hoc Networks - MANETs) surgem diante deste cenário e permite que dispositivos se comuniquem de forma autônoma, sem a necessidade de uma infraestrutura predefinida para fornecer comunicação e serviços. Porém, essa descentralização junto com as restrições naturais dos dispositivos móveis, proporcionar roteamento eficiente para MANETs permanece um desafio. Este trabalho propõe novas melhorias para o roteamento em MANETs que utilizam o protocolo HTR. Também considera o papel que usuários associados aos dispositivos desempenham dentro de uma organização. Desta forma, as políticas desenvolvidas podem guiar o roteamento também com base nestes papéis. Com este esquema, é possível melhorar a comunicação de acordo com necessidades de negócio e requerimentos de cenário. Para este fim, esta dissertação propõe um conjunto de políticas que afetam o comportamento do roteamento e analisa os impactos em termos de atraso, energia gasta e tempo de vida dos nós. Através de simulações, essas métricas são avaliadas também com variação de parâmetros como a quantidade de nós que participam da simulação, as características de mobilidade e o número de fontes de tráfego. Resultados mostram que é possível atingir esses objetivos sem causar grande impacto negativo no atraso fim a fim e no consumo de energia, duas métricas importantes em avaliações de redes MANET. Nós exploramos esses resultados em diversos cenários e detalhamos nossas descobertas, que podem servir como uma perspectiva diferente para futuras aplicações de redes MANET.

With the constant development of wireless technologies, the usageof wireless devices tends to increase even more in the future.Wireless multi-hop networks (WMNs) have emerged as a keytechnology to numerous potential scenarios, ranging from disasterrecovery to wireless broadband internet access. The distributedarchitecture of WMNs enables nodes to cooperatively relay othernode's packets. Because of their advantages over other wirelessnetworks, WMNs are undergoing rapid progress and inspiringnumerous applications. However, many technical issues still existin this field. In this thesis we investigate how Voice over IP(VoIP) and peer-to-peer (P2P) application are influenced bywireless multi-hop network characteristics and how to optimizethem in order to provide scalable communication.We first consider the deployment of VoIP service in wirelessmulti-hop networks, by using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)architecture. Our investigation shows that the centralized SIParchitecture imposes several challenges when deployed in thedecentralized wireless multi-hop environment. We find that VoIPquality metrics are severely degraded as the traffic and number ofmultiple hops to the gateway increase. In the context ofscalability, we further propose four alternative approaches whichavoid current limitations.In the second part of this thesis we tackle the network capacityproblem while providing scalable VoIP service over wirelessmulti-hop networks. The performance evaluation shows the influenceof intra and inter-flow interference in channel utilization, whichdirect impacts the VoIP capacity. In order to avoid the small VoIPpacket overhead, we propose a new adaptive hop-by-hop packetaggregation scheme based on wireless link characteristics. Ourperformance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can increasethe VoIP capacity by a two-fold gain.The study of peer-to-peer applicability over wireless multi-hopnetworks is another important contribution. A resource lookupapplication is realized through structured P2P overlay. We showthat due to several reasons, such as characteristics of wirelesslinks, multi-hop forwarding operation, and structured P2Pmanagement traffic aggressiveness the performance of traditionalP2P applications is rather low in wireless multi-hop environments.Therefore, we suggested that a trade-off between the P2P lookupefficiency and the P2P management traffic overhead can be achievedwhile maintaining the overlay network consistency in wirelessmulti-hop networks.

[pt] Uma rede móvel ad hoc consiste de uma coleção de dispositivos computacionais portáteis, equipados com uma interface de comunicação sem fio, com uma distribuição arbitrária e dinâmica no espaço, e onde cada host também serve de roteador para os demais hosts, descobrindo e mantendo rotas multi-hop entre os hosts. De uma forma geral, os protocolos para redes móveis ad hoc são mais complexos do que os protocolos para as redes fixas, devido à várias características destas redes, como por exemplo, a topologia dinâmica, a interferência mútua, o acesso compartilhado e a largura de banda restrita dos enlaces sem fio, bem como a operação com energia restrita e menor quantidade de recursos disponíveis nos hosts móveis. Um grande foco da pesquisa em redes móveis ad hoc tem sido o desenvolvimento, a análise e a comparação de protocolos de roteamento. Por isto, existe a demanda por ambientes para a prototipação rápida, a simulação e a depuração de protocolos de roteamento (e de outras camadas) para este tipo de redes. Preferencialmente estes ambientes devem ser flexíveis, ser simples de usar, e permitir definir vários níveis de abstrações para descrever as características físicas da rede móvel, tais como o padrão de mobilidade, os enlaces sem fio, consumo de energia, etc. Esta dissertação trata do projeto e implementação de um framework para a simulação de redes móveis ad hoc que visa facilitar a criação de ambientes para prototipação, teste, análise de desempenho e complexidade de protocolos para este tipo de redes. / [en] A mobile ad hoc network consists of a set of portable computational devices, equipped with a wireless communication interface, that are randomly and dynamically distributed in space, and where each host serves as a router for the other hosts by discovering and maintaining multi-hop routes among the hosts. In general, protocols for mobile ad hoc networks are more complex than equivalent protocols for static networks, due to several properties of such networks, such as its dynamic topology, the mutual interference, concurrent access and smaller communication bandwidth of the wireless links, as well as, operation with restricted amount of energy, and scarce resources of the mobile devices. A main focus of research in mobile ad hoc networks has been the development, analysis and comparison of routing protocols for such networks. Therefore, there is some demand for environments that facilitate the rapid prototyping, the simulation and the debugging of protocols at the network and other layers for such networks. These environments should preferably be flexible, easy to use, and allow for the definition of different levels of abstractions for modeling the main characteristics of the mobile network, such as the pattern of mobility, the wireless links, the energy consumption, etc. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a framework for the simulation of mobile ad hoc networks, which aims at supporting the development of concrete simulation environments for prototyping, testing and doing the complexity and performance analysis of protocols for such networks.

[EN] In recent years, advances in wireless technologies and improved sensing and computational capabilities have led to a gradual transition towards Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and related applications. These applications aim at improving road safety, provide smart navigation, and eco-friendly driving. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) provide a communication structure for ITS by equipping cars with advanced sensors and communication devices that enable a direct exchange of information between vehicles. Different types of ITS applications rely on two types of messages: periodic beacons and event-driven messages. Beacons include information such as geographical location, speed, and acceleration, and they are only disseminated to a close neighborhood. Differently from beacons, event-driven messages are only generated when a critical event of general interest occurs, and it is spread within a specific target area for the duration of the event. The reliability of information exchange is one of the main issues for vehicularcommunications since the safety of people on the road is directly related to the effectiveness of these transmissions. A Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol must guarantee reliable beacon broadcasting within deadline bounds to all vehicles in the neighbourhood, thereby providing them timely notifications about unsafe driving conditions or other hazardous events. Moreover, infotainment and comfort applications require reliable unicast transmissions that must be taken into account. However, high node mobility, highly dynamic topology, and lack of a central control unit, are issues that make the design of a reliable MAC protocol for vehicular environments a very difficult and challenging task, especially when efficient broadcasting strategies are required. The IEEE 802.11p MAC protocol, an approved amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard, is a random access protocol that is unable to provide guaranteed delay bounds with sufficient reliability in vehicular scenarios, especially under high channel usage. This problem is particularly serious when implementing (semi-) automated driving applications such as platooning, where inter-vehicle spacing is drastically reduced, and the control loop that manages and maintains the platoon requires frequent, timely and reliable exchange of status information (beacons). In this thesis novel protocols compatible with the IEEE 802.11 and 802.11p standards are proposed in order to optimally adjust the contention window size for unicast applications in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) and VANETs. Experimental tests comparing our proposals to existing solutions show that the former are able to improve the packet delivery ratio and the average end-to-end delay for unicast applications. Concerning efficient message diffusion (broadcast) in VANET environments, we proposed token-based MAC solutions to improve the performance achieved by existing 802.11p driving safety applications in different vehicular environments, including highway, urban, and platooning scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed solutions clearly outperform 802.11p when delay-bounded beacons and event notifications must be delivered. / [ES] Recientemente, los avances en las tecnologías inalámbricas y las mejoras en términos de capacidades de sensorización y computación de los dispositivos electrónicos, han dado lugar a una transición gradual hacia servicios y aplicaciones de los Sistemas Inteligentes de Transporte (ITS). Estas aplicaciones tienen como objetivo mejorar la seguridad vial, proporcionar una navegación inteligente, y promover la conducción eco-eficiente. Las redes vehiculares ad hoc (VANETs) proporcionan una infraestructura de comunicaciones para ITS al equipar los coches con sensores avanzados y dispositivos de comunicación que permiten el intercambio directo de información entre vehículos. Los diferentes tipos de aplicaciones ITS se basan en dos tipos de mensajes: mensajes periódicos conocidos como beacons y mensajes asociados a eventos. Los mensajes periódicos incluyen información relativa a la ubicación geográfica, la velocidad y la aceleración, entre otros, y sólo son distribuidos entre los vehículos vecinos. A diferencia de estos beacons, los mensajes asociados a eventos sólo se generan cuando se produce un evento crítico de interés general, el cual se propaga dentro del área de interés de dicho evento y mientras éste siga activo. La fiabilidad del intercambio de información es uno de los principales problemas para las comunicaciones vehiculares, debido principalmente a que las aplicaciones de seguridad dependen directamente de la eficacia de estas transmisiones. Un protocolo de Control de Acceso al Medio (MAC) debe garantizar la difusión fiable de información a todos los vehículos vecinos dentro de unos límites máximos de retardo, proporcionándoles las notificaciones oportunas respecto a condiciones de conducción inseguras y otros eventos peligrosos. Por otra parte, las aplicaciones de información y entretenimiento, así como las aplicaciones orientadas al confort, también requieren transmisiones fiables extremoa-extremo. Sin embargo, la alta movilidad de los vehículos, la variabilidad de la topología, así como la falta de una unidad central de control, son factores que hacen que el diseño de un protocolo MAC fiable para entornos vehiculares sea una tarea especialmente compleja, especialmente cuando son necesarias estrategias de difusión eficientes. El protocolo MAC IEEE 802.11p, una modificación ya aprobada al estándar IEEE 802.11 original para entornos de comunicación vehiculares, es un protocolo de acceso que no es capaz de garantizar unos límites de retardo con la fiabilidad necesaria para estos entornos, especialmente en escenarios de alta utilización del canal inalámbrico. Este problema es particularmente importante a la hora de implementar aplicaciones de conducción (semi-)automática, como el caso de grupos de vehículos donde la separación entre vehículos se reduce drásticamente, y el sistema de control que gestiona y mantiene el grupo requiere de un intercambio frecuente de información fiable y acotado en retardo. En esta tesis se proponen nuevos protocolos MAC compatibles con los estándares IEEE 802.11 y 802.11p basados en el ajuste del tamaño de la ventana de contención para aplicaciones unicast en rede MANETs y VANETs. Los resultados experimentales obtenidos comparando nuestras propuestas con las soluciones existentes muestran que los protocolos propuestos son capaces de mejorar la tasa de entrega de paquetes y el retardo medio extremo-a-extremo para aplicaciones unicast. En lo que respecta a la difusión eficiente de mensajes broadcast en entornos VANET, se han propuesto soluciones MAC basadas en el uso de tokens que mejoran las prestaciones de aplicaciones de conducción segura basadas en el estándar 802.11p, tanto en autopistas, zonas urbanas, y escenarios con grupos de vehículos. Los resultados experimentales muestran que las soluciones propuestas superan claramente al protocolo 802.11p cuando es necesario entregar mensajes y notificaciones de eventos con restricc / [CAT] Recentment, els avan en les tecnologies sense fils i les millores en termes de capacitats de sensorització i computació dels dispositius electrònics, han donat lloc a una transició gradual cap a serveis i aplicacions dels sistemes intelligents de transport (ITS). Aquestes aplicacions tenen com a objectiu millorar la seguretat vial, proporcionar una navegació intelligent, i promoure la conducció ecoeficient. Les xarxes vehiculars ad hoc (VANET) proporcionen una infraestructura de comunicacions per a ITS, ja que equipen els cotxes amb sensors avançats i dispositius de comunicació que permeten l'intercanvi directe d'informació entre vehicles. Els diversos tipus d'aplicacions ITS es basen en dos classes de missatges: missatges periòdics coneguts com a beacons i missatges associats a esdeveniments. Els missatges periòdics inclouen informació relativa a la ubicació geogràfica, la velocitat i l'acceleració, entre uns altres, i només són distribuïts entre els vehicles veïns. A diferència d'aquests beacons, els missatges associats a esdeveniments només es generen quan es produeix un esdeveniment crític d'interès general, el qual es propaga dins de l àrea d'interès d'aquest esdeveniment i mentre aquest seguisca actiu. La fiabilitat de l'intercanvi d'informació és un dels principals problemes per a les comunicacions vehicular, principalment perquè les aplicacions de seguretat depenen directament de l'eficàcia d'aquestes transmissions. Un protocol de control d'accés al medi (MAC) ha de garantir la difusió fiable d'informació a tots els vehicles veïns dins d'uns límits màxims de retard, i proporcionar-los les notificacions oportunes respecte a condicions de conducció insegures i altres esdeveniments perillosos. D'altra banda, les aplicacions d'informació i entreteniment, com també les aplicacions orientades al confort, també requereixen transmissions fiables extrema-extrem. No obstant això, l'alta mobilitat dels vehicles, la variabilitat de la topologia, i la falta d'una unitat central de control, són factors que fan que el disseny d'un protocol MAC fiable per a entorns vehiculars siga una tasca especialment complexa, especialment quan són necessàries estratègies de difusió eficients. El protocol MAC IEEE 802.11p, una modificació ja aprovada a l'estàndard IEEE 802.11 original per a entorns de comunicació vehiculars, és un protocol d'accés que no és capa garantir uns límits de retard amb la fiabilitat necessària per a aquests entorns, especialment en escenaris d'alta utilització del canal sense fil. Aquest problema és particularment important a l'hora d'implementar aplicacions de conducció (semi)automàtica, com el cas de grups de vehicles en què la separació entre vehicles es redueix dràsticament, i el sistema de control que gestiona i manté el grup requereix un intercanvi freqüent d'informació fiable i delimitat en retard. En aquesta tesi es proposen nous protocols MAC compatibles amb els estàndards IEEE 802.11 i 802.11p basats en l'ajust de les dimensions de la finestra de contenció per a aplicacions unicast en xarxes MANET i VANET. Els resultats experimentals obtinguts comparant les nostres propostes amb les solucions existents mostren que els protocols proposats són capa de millorar la taxa de lliurament de paquets i el retard mitjà extrem-a-extrem per a aplicacions unicast. Pel que fa a la difusió eficient de missatges broadcast en entorns VANET, s'han proposat solucions MAC basades en l'ús de tokens que milloren les prestacions d'aplicacions de conducció segura basades en l'estàndard 802.11p, tant en autopistes, zones urbanes, i escenaris amb grups de vehicles. Els resultats experimentals mostren que les solucions proposades superen clarament el protocol 802.11p quan cal lliurar missatges i notificacions d'esdeveniments amb restriccions de latència. / Balador, A. (2016). Design and Evaluation of Efficient Medium Access Control Solutions for Vehicular Environments [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/64073 / TESIS

Distributed systems like e-commerce and e-market places, peer-to-peer networks, social networks, and mobile ad hoc networks require cooperation among the participating entities to guarantee the formation and sustained existence of network services. The reliability of interactions among anonymous entities is a significant issue in such environments. The distributed entities establish connections to interact with others, which may include selfish and misbehaving entities and result in bad experiences. Therefore, trustworthiness evaluation using trust management techniques has become a significant issue in securing these environments to allow entities decide on the reliability and trustworthiness of other entities, besides it helps coping with defection problems and stimulating entities to cooperate. Recent models on evaluating trustworthiness in distributed systems have heavily focused on assessing trustworthiness of entities and isolate misbehaviours based on single trust metrics. Less effort has been put on the investigation of the subjective nature and differences in the way trustworthiness is perceived to produce a composite multidimensional trust metrics to overcome the limitation of considering single trust metric. In the light of this context, this thesis concerns the evaluation of entities’ trustworthiness by the design and investigation of trust metrics that are computed using multiple properties of trust and considering environment. Based on the concept of probabilistic theory of trust management technique, this thesis models trust systems and designs cooperation techniques to evaluate trustworthiness in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A recommendation based trust model with multi-parameters filtering algorithm, and multidimensional metric based on social and QoS trust model are proposed to secure MANETs. Effectiveness of each of these models in evaluating trustworthiness and discovering misbehaving nodes prior to interactions, as well as their influence on the network performance has been investigated. The results of investigating both the trustworthiness evaluation and the network performance are promising. / Ministry of Higher Education in Libya and the Libyan Cultural Attaché bureau in London

No description available.

In ant societies, and, more in general, in insect societies, the activities of the individuals, as well as of the society as a whole, are not regulated by any explicit form of centralized control. On the other hand, adaptive and robust behaviors transcending the behavioral repertoire of the single individual can be easily observed at society level. These complex global behaviors are the result of self-organizing dynamics driven by local interactions and communications among a number of relatively simple individuals. The simultaneous presence of these and other fascinating and unique characteristics have made ant societies an attractive and inspiring model for building new algorithms and new multi-agent systems. In the last decade, ant societies have been taken as a reference for an ever growing body of scientific work, mostly in the fields of robotics, operations research, and telecommunications. Among the different works inspired by ant colonies, the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic (ACO) is probably the most successful and popular one. The ACO metaheuristic is a multi-agent framework for combinatorial optimization whose main components are: a set of ant-like agents, the use of memory and of stochastic decisions, and strategies of collective and distributed learning. It finds its roots in the experimental observation of a specific foraging behavior of some ant colonies that, under appropriate conditions, are able to select the shortest path among few possible paths connecting their nest to a food site. The pheromone, a volatile chemical substance laid on the ground by the ants while walking and affecting in turn their moving decisions according to its local intensity, is the mediator of this behavior. All the elements playing an essential role in the ant colony foraging behavior were understood, thoroughly reverse-engineered and put to work to solve problems of combinatorial optimization by Marco Dorigo and his co-workers at the beginning of the 1990's. From that moment on it has been a flourishing of new combinatorial optimization algorithms designed after the first algorithms of Dorigo's et al., and of related scientific events. In 1999 the ACO metaheuristic was defined by Dorigo, Di Caro and Gambardella with the purpose of providing a common framework for describing and analyzing all these algorithms inspired by the same ant colony behavior and by the same common process of reverse-engineering of this behavior. Therefore, the ACO metaheuristic was defined a posteriori, as the result of a synthesis effort effectuated on the study of the characteristics of all these ant-inspired algorithms and on the abstraction of their common traits. The ACO's synthesis was also motivated by the usually good performance shown by the algorithms (e.g., for several important combinatorial problems like the quadratic assignment, vehicle routing and job shop scheduling, ACO implementations have outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms). The definition and study of the ACO metaheuristic is one of the two fundamental goals of the thesis. The other one, strictly related to this former one, consists in the design, implementation, and testing of ACO instances for problems of adaptive routing in telecommunication networks. This thesis is an in-depth journey through the ACO metaheuristic, during which we have (re)defined ACO and tried to get a clear understanding of its potentialities, limits, and relationships with other frameworks and with its biological background. The thesis takes into account all the developments that have followed the original 1999's definition, and provides a formal and comprehensive systematization of the subject, as well as an up-to-date and quite comprehensive review of current applications. We have also identified in dynamic problems in telecommunication networks the most appropriate domain of application for the ACO ideas. According to this understanding, in the most applicative part of the thesis we have focused on problems of adaptive routing in networks and we have developed and tested four new algorithms. Adopting an original point of view with respect to the way ACO was firstly defined (but maintaining full conceptual and terminological consistency), ACO is here defined and mainly discussed in the terms of sequential decision processes and Monte Carlo sampling and learning. More precisely, ACO is characterized as a policy search strategy aimed at learning the distributed parameters (called pheromone variables in accordance with the biological metaphor) of the stochastic decision policy which is used by so-called ant agents to generate solutions. Each ant represents in practice an independent sequential decision process aimed at constructing a possibly feasible solution for the optimization problem at hand by using only information local to the decision step. Ants are repeatedly and concurrently generated in order to sample the solution set according to the current policy. The outcomes of the generated solutions are used to partially evaluate the current policy, spot the most promising search areas, and update the policy parameters in order to possibly focus the search in those promising areas while keeping a satisfactory level of overall exploration. This way of looking at ACO has facilitated to disclose the strict relationships between ACO and other well-known frameworks, like dynamic programming, Markov and non-Markov decision processes, and reinforcement learning. In turn, this has favored reasoning on the general properties of ACO in terms of amount of complete state information which is used by the ACO's ants to take optimized decisions and to encode in pheromone variables memory of both the decisions that belonged to the sampled solutions and their quality. The ACO's biological context of inspiration is fully acknowledged in the thesis. We report with extensive discussions on the shortest path behaviors of ant colonies and on the identification and analysis of the few nonlinear dynamics that are at the very core of self-organized behaviors in both the ants and other societal organizations. We discuss these dynamics in the general framework of stigmergic modeling, based on asynchronous environment-mediated communication protocols, and (pheromone) variables priming coordinated responses of a number of ``cheap' and concurrent agents. The second half of the thesis is devoted to the study of the application of ACO to problems of online routing in telecommunication networks. This class of problems has been identified in the thesis as the most appropriate for the application of the multi-agent, distributed, and adaptive nature of the ACO architecture. Four novel ACO algorithms for problems of adaptive routing in telecommunication networks are throughly described. The four algorithms cover a wide spectrum of possible types of network: two of them deliver best-effort traffic in wired IP networks, one is intended for quality-of-service (QoS) traffic in ATM networks, and the fourth is for best-effort traffic in mobile ad hoc networks. The two algorithms for wired IP networks have been extensively tested by simulation studies and compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for a wide set of reference scenarios. The algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks is still under development, but quite extensive results and comparisons with a popular state-of-the-art algorithm are reported. No results are reported for the algorithm for QoS, which has not been fully tested. The observed experimental performance is excellent, especially for the case of wired IP networks: our algorithms always perform comparably or much better than the state-of-the-art competitors. In the thesis we try to understand the rationale behind the brilliant performance obtained and the good level of popularity reached by our algorithms. More in general, we discuss the reasons of the general efficacy of the ACO approach for network routing problems compared to the characteristics of more classical approaches. Moving further, we also informally define Ant Colony Routing (ACR), a multi-agent framework explicitly integrating learning components into the ACO's design in order to define a general and in a sense futuristic architecture for autonomic network control. Most of the material of the thesis comes from a re-elaboration of material co-authored and published in a number of books, journal papers, conference proceedings, and technical reports. The detailed list of references is provided in the Introduction.

A evolução tecnológica das redes de telecomunicações sem fio permite que organizações de redes mais inteligentes sejam vislumbradas. É possível imaginar um sistema de telefonia formado por dispositivos móveis autônomos que não necessite de nenhuma infraestrutura pré-estabelecida para trocar informações com seus vizinhos, de acordo com o alcance do raio de transmissão. Assim, as informações poderiam ser repassadas de nó em nó, formando uma rede de múltiplos saltos. A ausência de uma entidade central também poderia melhorar a tolerância a falhas do sistema, principalmente por gerar uma redundância de caminhos possíveis entre os nós. Analisamos o desempenho desse sistema em diferentes cenários e a sensibilidade à variação de parâmetros como o raio de transmissão, interferências, a quantidade de nós e número de saltos máximo permitido (TTL), e testamos estratégias de comunicação com raio fixo, raio variável, número de vizinhos mínimo e etc., através de modelagem e simulação baseada em agentes. De maneira geral, a estratégia de transmissão com raio variável apresentou a melhor taxa de mensagens recebidas e a menor média de saltos até o destino, porém com maior nível de energia do sistema. A estratégia de raio fixo apresentou a menor energia total gasta pelo sistema para enviar as mensagens, porém, com uma taxa menor de mensagens recebidas. Além disso, avaliamos que as principais causas de perdas de pacotes estão associadas com o aumento da mobilidade, a redução do TTL e as interferências, sendo que cada uma contribui mais ou menos de acordo com o cenário estudado. / The technological development of Wireless Networks leads to more intelligent networks structures. One can imagine a mobile data system consisting of autonomous mobile devices that do not require any pre-established infrastructure to exchange information one with another, limited mainly by the transmission radius. Thus, data could be forwarded from node to node, forming a multihop network. The absence of a central entity could also improve fault tolerance by allowing redundant paths for nodes to communicate. We analyzed the performance of the system in different scenarios and system behavior regarding parameters variations such as transmission radius, interferences, the number of nodes and maximum allowed number of hops (TTL), and tested communication strategies with fixed radius, variable radius, minimum number of neighbors to transmit, etc., through modeling and simulation-based agents. In general, variable radius strategy had the best rate of incoming messages and the lowest average number of hops to the destination. However it presented the higher level of system energy. In one hand, fixed radius strategy presented the lowest total energy expended by the system to send messages, but, in the other hand, the rate of incoming messages was lower. Furthermore, we discovered the main causes of packet losses are associated with increased mobility, reducing the TTL and interference, each of which contributes more or less in accordance with the scenario.