Mobile communication devices may be used for spreading multimedia data without support of an infrastructure. Such a scheme, where the data is carried by people walking around and relayed from device to device by means of short range radio, could potentially form a public content distribution system that spans vast urban areas. The transport mechanism is the flow of people and it can be studied but not engineered. We study the efficiency of pedestrian content distribution by modeling the mobility of people moving around in a city, constrained by a given topology. The model is supplemented by simulation of similar or related scenarios for validation and extension. The results show that contents spread well with pedestrian speeds already at low arrival rates into a studied region. Our contributions are both the queuing analytic model that captures the flow of people and the results on the feasibility of pedestrian content distribution. / <p>QC 20130109</p>

Enhancing route request broadcasting protocols constitutes a substantial part of research in mobile ad hoc network routing. In the thesis, enhancements of ad hoc routing protocols, energy efficiency metrics and clustered topology generators are discussed. The contributions include the followings. First, a node caching enhancement of Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is introduced. Extensive simulation studies of the enhanced AODV in NS2 shows up to 9-fold reduction in the routing overhead, up to 20% improvement in the packet delivery ratio and up to 60% reduction in the end-to-end delay. The largest improvement happens to highly stressed situations. Secondly, new metrics for evaluating energy efficiency of routing protocols are suggested. New node cached AODV protocols employing non-adaptive and adaptive load balancing techniques were proposed for extending network lifetime and increasing network throughput. Finally, the impact of node clustered topology on ad hoc network is explored. A novel method for generating clustered layout in NS2 is introduced and experiments indicate performance degradation of AODV protocols for the case of two clusters.

Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is a typical hybrid routing protocol used in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Hybrid routing protocols are especially suitable for dynamic environments because they combine the best features of proactive and reactive routing protocols. The Gossip-based Zone Routing Protocol (GZRP) uses a gossip scheme, in which the node forwards a packet to some nodes instead of all nodes to further reduce the control overhead. However, GZRP does not perform well when the network includes articulation points since packets will be lost if an articulation node happens not to forward the packet or nodes happen not to forward packets to the articulation point. To raise the packet delivery ratio, the gossip probability of articulation points must be set to 1 and the packets to be forwarded must be sent to the articulation points in peripheral nodes. Accordingly, how to identify articulation nodes in the network becomes a critical issue. This paper proposes an effective scheme, called articulation point detection (APD), to find the articulation points. Simulation results show that the proposed APD-GZRP (GZRP with articulation point detection) can improve the packet delivery ratio and reduce both the control overhead and power consumption.

Broadcasting is a communication model for a node to emit the packets via wireless channels to its neighbor nodes. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), it is commonly implemented through flooding to find routes, send alarm signals and page a particular host. Conventionally, ad hoc routing protocols, such as AODV, use blind flooding extensively for on-demand route discovery, which could result in a high number of redundant retransmissions, leading to serious contention and collisions referred to as the broadcast storm problem. A gossip-based approach, in which each node forwards a message with some probability, has been proposed in past years to alleviate this problem. The approach combines gossiping with AODV (denoted as AODV+G) and exhibits a significant performance improvement in simulations. In this paper, we make a mathematical inference from observing the behavior of the gossip-based approach, and improve the gossip-based approach by employing the remaining energy of nodes in the gossip mechanism (denoted as AODV+GE) to extend the lifetime of the entire network and improve the packet delivery ratio. Through mathematical inference and simulations we show that AODV+GE outperforms AODV+G in terms of the lifetime of the whole network, average node energy consumption, and packet delivery ratio.

Ad hoc networks are becoming an interesting research area, as they inher-ently support unique network applications for the wireless communications in a rug-ged environment, which requires rapid deployment and is difficult to be provided by an infrastructure network. Many issues need to be addressed for the ad hoc networks. In this dissertation, we propose an efficient distributed coordination function, a dynamic rate adaptation and fragmentation scheme, and a simultaneous frame transmission scheme on the media access control protocol to enhance the power conservation of mobile hosts and to im-prove the network throughput of an ad hoc network. Extensive simulations are studied to evaluate the improvement of the proposed schemes. The results of the simulations exhibit significant improvement to the stan-dard access control protocol. Not only the improvement of the throughput of the ad hoc networks, but also the conservation of the battery power of the mobile hosts were achieved with our schemes.

A mobile ad hoc network consists of certain nodes that communicate only through wireless medium and can move arbitrarily. The key feature of a mobile ad hoc network is the mobility of the nodes. Because of the mobility, communication links form and disappear as nodes come into and go out of each other's communica- tion range. Mobile ad hoc networks are particularly useful in situations like disaster recovery and search, military operations, etc. Research on mobile ad hoc networks has drawn a huge amount of attention recently. The main challenges for mobile ad hoc networks are the sparse resources and frequent mobility. Most of the research work has been focused on the MAC and routing layer. In this work, we focus on distributed services for mobile ad hoc networks. These services will provide some fundamental functions in developing various applications for mobile ad hoc networks. In particular, we focus on the clock synchronization, connected dominating set, and k-mutual exclusion problems in mobile ad hoc networks.

The research in wireless communications and in-vehicle computing systems has opened up new fields of applications for transportation systems. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) emerge as a contribution to the solution of providing safer and more efficient roads and to increase passenger safety. This thesis treats different issues that influence the performance of wireless vehicle communication systems and it proposes a general design procedure for the construction of a test environment for VANETs. A comprehensive survey of the different parameters that affect the system performance in the field of wireless vehicle communications is provided. These parameters are then analysed and quantified to serve as guidelines when identifying and designing the different components of the test environment. One such component is a simulator that enables VANET performance evaluation and allows identification of bottlenecks in the network functionality. In addition, suggestions for a hardware platform and an operating system for the development of a suitable on-board test-bed for performance measurements are presented. The design procedure of such a test environment is intended to be used by researchers and engineers working in the field of wireless communications and ad hoc networking with special regard to the automotive sector.

The measurability of Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is the precondition of itsmanagement, performance optimization and network resources re-allocations. However, MANET is an infrastructure-free, multi-hop, andself-organized temporary network, comprised of a group of mobile nodes with wirelesscommunication devices. Not only does its topology structure vary with time going by, butalso the communication protocol used in its network layer or data link layer is diverse andnon-standard.In order to solve the problem of interior links performance (such as packet loss rate anddelay) measurement in MANET, this thesis has adopted an external measurement basedon network tomography (NT). To the best of our knowledge, NT technique is adaptable for Ad Hoc networkmeasurement.This thesis has deeply studied MANET measurement technique based on NT. The maincontributions are:(1) An analysis technique on MANET topology dynamic characteristic based onmobility model was proposed. At first, an Ad Hoc network mobility model formalizationis described. Then a MANET topology snapshots capturing method was proposed to findand verify that MANET topology varies in steady and non-steady state in turnperiodically. At the same time, it was proved that it was practicable in theory to introduceNT technique into Ad Hoc network measurement. The fitness hypothesis verification wasadopted to obtain the rule of Ad Hoc network topology dynamic characteristic parameters,and the Markov stochastic process was adopted to analyze MANET topology dynamiccharacteristic. The simulation results show that the method above not only is valid andgenerable to be used for all mobility models in NS-2 Tool, but also could obtain thetopology state keeping experimental formula and topology state varying probabilityformula.IV(2) An analysis technique for MANET topology dynamic characteristic based onmeasurement sample was proposed. When the scenario file of mobile models could notbe obtained beforehand, End-to-End measurement was used in MANET to obtain thepath delay time. Then topology steady period of MANET is inferred by judging whetherpath delay dithering is close to zero. At the same time, the MANET topology wasidentified by using hierarchical clustering method based on measurement sample of pathperformance during topology steady period in order to support the link performanceinference. The simulation result verified that the method above could not only detect themeasurement window time of MANET effectively, but also identify the MANETtopology architecture during measurement window time correctly.(3) A MANET link performance inference algorithm based on linear analysis modelwas proposed. The relation of inequality between link and path performance, such as lossrate of MANET, was deduced according to a linear model. The phenomena thatcommunication characteristic of packets, such as delay and loss rate, is more similarwhen the sub-paths has longer shared links was proved in the document. When the rankof the routing matrix is equal to that of its augmentation matrix, the linear model wasused to describe the Ad Hoc network link performance inference method. The simulationresults show that the algorithm not only is effective, but also has short computing time.(4) A Link performance inference algorithm based on multi-objectives optimizationwas proposed. When the rank of the routing matrix is not equal to that of its augmentationmatrix, the link performance inference was changed into multi-objectives optimizationand genetic algorithm is used to infer link performance. The probability distribution oflink performance in certain time t was obtained by performing more measurements andstatistically analyzing the hypo-solutions. Through the simulation, it can be safelyconcluded that the internal link performance, such as, link loss ratio and link delay, can beinferred correctly when the rank of the routing matrix is not equal to that of itsaugmentation matrix.

Wireless networks are less reliable than wired networks because channels are “exposed” to the surrounding environment that is susceptible to interference and noise. To minimize losses of data due to collisions, wireless networks need a mechanism to regulate the access on the transmission medium. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols control access to the shared communication medium so that it can be used efficiently. In this thesis, we first describe the collision-controlled Dual Prohibition Multiple Access (DPMA) protocol [45]. The main mechanisms implemented in DPMA, such as binary dual prohibition, power control, interference control, and support for differentiated services (DiffServ), are presented in detail. We conducted a thorough simulation study on DPMA protocol from several aspects. First, we conduct simulations to observe the effects of binary competition number (BCN), unit slot length and safe margin on the performance of DPMA. Secondly, the DiffServ capability of DPMA is demonstrated through simulation results. Finally, we compare the DPMA protocol with the CSMA/CA protocol and find that DPMA with optimal configuration has better performance than CSMA/CA under both low and high network density. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-28 16:25:02.515

The evolution of communication networks has led us to an era where you cannot only perform surgery halfway across the world, but do so while being in the comfort of your own home. By eliminating the need for wires, wireless networks revolutionised communication networks by enabling nodes to communicate while being in a mobile state. The concept opened many doors to new applications and possibilities. Network Coding is a technique that optimises the throughput of a network by coding packets. Geo-Routing is a routing method that operates by using the geographical distances between nodes as the routing metric. Opportunistic Routing is a routing method that exploits the broadcast characteristics of wireless networks. In this thesis, we developed a routing scheme that incorporates Network Coding, Geo- Routing and energy aware conditions. It accomplishes this task by using one of the key phases constituting Opportunistic Routing. The developed routing scheme was implemented in OMNeT++. Various simulation experiments were conducted in OMNeT++ pertaining to the implemented scheme. The results indicate significant increase in performance metrics such as throughput and survivability. / Thesis (MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013