The safety-message dissemination problem for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) was investigated. Four novel techniques were contributed for the efficient and reliable routing of safety messages in the vehicular ad hoc networks. The instant-broadcast technique was proposed to improve the end-to-end dissemination delay. The lane-based sectoring mechanism was presented for the collision mitigation in the dense-urban traffic scenario. The negative acknowledgment with smart neighborhood (NSN) technique was proposed to ensure the reliability of reception through recovering the packet loss caused by interference. Finally, the negative acknowledgment with smart neighborhood - hole recovery (NSN-H) technique was presented to provide guaranteed reception of the safety message at each individual node in the VANET. The investigation of the safety message routing in VANET conducted in this research also revealed the significance of hitherto-neglected factors that influence the vehicular network. Significance of the small payload size of the VANET safety message, the effect of road width on the multi-hop relay, and the attenuation caused by vehicles in the propagation path were among the important revealed factors.

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

The Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has been studied in many fields since it has the ability to provide a variety of services, such as detecting oncoming collisions and providing warning signals to alert the driver. The services provided by VANET are often based on collaboration among vehicles that are equipped with relatively simple motion sensors and GPS units. Awareness of its precise location is vital to every vehicle in VANET so that it can provide accurate data to its peers. Currently, typical localization techniques integrate GPS receiver data and measurements of the vehicle’s motion. However, when the vehicle passes through an environment that creates a multipath effect, these techniques fail to produce the high localization accuracy that they attain in open environments. Unfortunately, vehicles often travel in environments that cause a multipath effect, such as areas with high buildings, trees, or tunnels. The goal of this research is to minimize the multipath effect with respect to the localization accuracy of vehicles in VANET. The proposed technique first detects whether there is a noise in the vehicle location estimate that is caused by the multipath effect using neural network technique. It next takes advantage of the communications among the VANET vehicles in order to obtain more information from the vehicle’s neighbours, such as distances from target vehicle and their location estimates. The proposed technique integrates all these pieces of information with the vehicle’s own data and applies optimization techniques in order to minimize the location estimate error. The new techniques presented in this thesis decrease the error in the location estimate by 53% in the best cases, and in the worst case produce almost the same error in the location estimate as the traditional technique. Moreover, the simulation results show that 60% of the vehicles in VANET decrease the error in their location estimates by more than 13.8%.

The Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has been studied in many fields since it has the ability to provide a variety of services, such as detecting oncoming collisions and providing warning signals to alert the driver. The services provided by VANET are often based on collaboration among vehicles that are equipped with relatively simple motion sensors and GPS units. Awareness of its precise location is vital to every vehicle in VANET so that it can provide accurate data to its peers. Currently, typical localization techniques integrate GPS receiver data and measurements of the vehicle’s motion. However, when the vehicle passes through an environment that creates a multipath effect, these techniques fail to produce the high localization accuracy that they attain in open environments. Unfortunately, vehicles often travel in environments that cause a multipath effect, such as areas with high buildings, trees, or tunnels. The goal of this research is to minimize the multipath effect with respect to the localization accuracy of vehicles in VANET. The proposed technique first detects whether there is a noise in the vehicle location estimate that is caused by the multipath effect using neural network technique. It next takes advantage of the communications among the VANET vehicles in order to obtain more information from the vehicle’s neighbours, such as distances from target vehicle and their location estimates. The proposed technique integrates all these pieces of information with the vehicle’s own data and applies optimization techniques in order to minimize the location estimate error. The new techniques presented in this thesis decrease the error in the location estimate by 53% in the best cases, and in the worst case produce almost the same error in the location estimate as the traditional technique. Moreover, the simulation results show that 60% of the vehicles in VANET decrease the error in their location estimates by more than 13.8%.

In this dissertation, routing protocols, load-balancing protocols, and efficient evaluation techniques for multi-hop mobile wireless networks are explored. With the advancements made in wireless communication and computer technologies, a new type of mobile wireless network, known as a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), has drawn constant attention. In recent years, several routing protocols for MANETs have been proposed. However, there still remains the need for mechanisms for better scalability support with respect to network size, traffic volume, and mobility. To address this issue, a new method for multi-hop routing in MANETs called Dynamic NIx-Vector Routing (DNVR) is proposed. DNVR has several distinct features compared to other existing on-demand routing protocols, which lead to more stable routes and better scalability. Currently, ad hoc routing protocols lack load-balancing capabilities. Therefore they often fail to provide good service quality, especially in the presence of a large volume of network traffic since the network load concentrates on some nodes, resulting in a highly congested environment. To address this issue, a novel load-balancing technique for ad hoc on-demand routing protocols is proposed. The new method is simple but very effective in achieving load balance and congestion alleviation. In addition, it operates in a completely distributed fashion. To evaluate and verify wireless network protocols effectively, especially to test their scalability properties, scalable and efficient network simulation methods are required. Usually simulation of such large-scale wireless networks needs a long execution time and requires a large amount of computing resources such as powerful CPUs and memory. Traditionally, to cope with this problem, parallel network simulation techniques with parallel computing capabilities have been considered. This dissertation explores a different type of method, which is efficient and can be achieved with a sequential simulation, as well as a parallel and distributed technique for large-scale mobile wireless networks.

The development of miniaturized radio and sensing technologies have enabled the deployment of large quantities of wireless sensors capable of forming multi-hop networks. Emerging applications of this technology such as surveillance and disaster monitoring have throughput and efficiency requirements not met by current routing algorithms. These requirements are also shared by ad-hoc networks. Early routing protocols for these wireless networks were based on algorithms designed for wired networks. Geographic routing (routing based on position), was proposed. These algorithms perform poorly since they do not account for the fading and interference effects of wireless channels. Recent protocols that have attempted to account for the wireless channel focus on single-hop situations and are not readily extensible to multi-hop networks. In this thesis we present a framework for routing based on a distributed routing decision and provide several example protocols. This framework provides a cross-layer design where the routing decision is decided through silent negotiation between candidate relays. We investigate the performance and parameters of this framework. We then present an example protocol using this framework which provides low-overhead opportunistic routing using cooperative diversity. This protocol uses the intrinsic characteristics of the wireless channel to achieve diversity while still maintaining relatively low overhead. An adaptation of the protocol for heterogeneous networks equipped with multiple antennas has also been discussed and evaluated through simulations. We also investigate another protocol based on this framework using the product of the instantaneous packet reception rate and the marginal progress towards the destination as a routing metric, offering enhanced throughput.

Internet worm attacks have become increasingly more frequent and have had a major impact on the economy, making the detection and prevention of these attacks a top security concern. Several countermeasures have been proposed and evaluated in recent literature. However, the eect of these proposed defensive mechanisms on legitimate competing traffic has not been analyzed. The first contribution of this thesis is a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of several of these proposed mechanisms, including a measure of their effect on normal web browsing activities. In addition, we introduce a new defensive approach that can easily be implemented on existing hosts, and which significantly reduces the rate of spread of worms using TCP connections to perform the infiltration. Our approach has no measurable effect on legitimate traffic. The second contribution is presenting a variant of the flash worm that we term Compact Flash or CFlash that is capable of spreading even faster than its predecessor. We perform a comparative study between the flash worm and the CFlash worm using a full-detail packet-level simulator, and the results show the increase in propagation rate of the new worm given the same set of parameters. The third contribution is the study of the behavior of TCP based worms in MANETs. We develop an analytical model for the worm spread of TCP worms in the MANETs environment that accounts for payloadsize, bandwidthsharing, radio range, nodal density and several other parameters specific for MANET topologies. We also present numerical solutions for the model and verify the results using packetlevel simulations. The results show that the analytical model developed here matches the results of the packetlevel simulation in most cases.

In this thesis, performance of the Contribution Reward Routing Protocol with Shapley Value (CAP-SV), a power-aware routing protocol for ad hoc networking is analyzed. Literature study on ad hoc network routing and ower-awareness is given. The overhead induced by the extra packets of the redirection mechanism of CAP-SV is formulized and the factors affecting this overhead are discussed. Then, the power consumption of CAP-SV is analytically analized using a linear power consumption model. It is shown that CAP-SV performs better than AODV regarding power consumption. The analysis validates the simulation results reported in the literature and provides general principles of how protocol and scenario parameters affect the performance.

The most studies on ad hoc network mainly focus on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) of transport layer, the routing of network layer, multi-hop of Data-link layer, and the integration of WWAN and WLAN to increase the load balancing, coverage, and power savings. Nevertheless, in this dissertation, the system performances of four schemes proposed are improved with respect to data-link and network layers. One purpose of the data link layer is to perform error correction or detection. The other is responsible for the way in which different users share the transmission medium. The Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayer is responsible for allowing frames to be sent over the shared media without undue interference with other users. This aspect is referred to as multi-access communications. In the first and third schemes, the FDMA (Frequently-division multiple access) is employed to improve system performance, while in the fourth scheme the CDMA (Code-division multiple access) is used to enhance performance. Network layer has several functions, first is to determine the routing information. A second function is to determine the quality of service. A third function is flow control to avoid network to become congested. In the third scheme, the data-link and network layers have been used to increase system performance. Furthermore, the second scheme mainly concentrates on power savings under wireless sensor network. In ad hoc wireless networks, most data delivery is accomplished through multi-hop routing (hop by hop). This approach may leads to long delay and routing overhead regardless of which routing protocol is used. To overcome this inherent characteristic, this work presents a novel idea adopting dual-card-mode and performing self-organization process with specific IP naming and channel assignment to form a hierarchical star-graph ad hoc network (HSG-ad hoc) which can not only expedite the data transmission but also eliminate the route discovery procedure during data transmission. Therefore, the overall network reliability and stability can be significantly improved. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves substantial improvements in terms of average end-to-end delay, throughput, and packet delivery ratio. In a large-scale wireless sensor network, a topology is needed to gather state-based data from sensor network and efficiently aggregate the data given the requirements of balanced load, minimal energy consumption and prolonged network lifetime. In this study, we proposed a ring-based hierarchical clustering scheme (RHC) consisting of four phases: pre-deployment, parent-child relationship building, deployment, and member join phases. Two node types are distributed throughout the network: cluster head nodes (type 1 node) and general sensor nodes (type 2 node). The type 1 node has better battery life, software capability and hardware features than the type 2 node does; therefore, the type 1 node is a better cluster head than type 2 node. Most routing protocols focus mainly on obtaining a workable route without considering network traffic conditions for a mobile ad hoc network. Consequently, real time and multimedia applications do not achieve adequate quality of service (QoS). To support QoS, this work proposes a QoS-aware routing protocol, i.e. QUality of service with Admission control RouTing (QUART), that incorporates an admission control scheme into route discovery and route setup procedures. One variant of QUART, called, QUART-DD, adopts a dual-card dual-signal mechanism to increase system performance. Simulation results indicate that QUART-DD can significantly improve packet delivery ratio and throughput, while having a lower average end-to-end delay than routing protocols without QoS support. The performance of ad hoc wireless network suffers from problems in multi-hop transmission. This study adopts code division to modulate the frame header and the frame payload separately. A common spreading code modulates the frame header, and a special spreading code is negotiated and to modulate the frame payload. A field in the frame header indicates the spreading code used to modulate the successive frame payload. The modulated frame is transparent for every node, enabling many frames to be transmitted simultaneously. To allow the special spreading code negotiation, the RTS/CTS command is modified as ERTS/ECTS, and a spreading code table (SCT) is maintained in every node. Due to the space reuse, the proposed scheme has superior performance in latency and bandwidth utilization, as revealed by the simulation results.

Managing interference is the main technical challenge in wireless networks. Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) methods are key components to overcome the interference bottleneck and deliver higher data rates. The most efficient MIMO techniques require channel state information (CSI). In practice, this information is inaccurate due to errors in CSI acquisition, as well as mobility and delay. CSI inaccuracy reduces the performance gains provided by MIMO. When compounded with uncoordinated intercell interference, the degradation in MIMO performance is accentuated. This dissertation investigates the impact of CSI inaccuracy on the performance of increasingly complex interference limited networks, starting with a single interferer scenario, continuing to a heterogeneous network with a femtocell overlay, and finishing with a clustered multicell coordination model for randomly deployed transmitting nodes. First, this dissertation analyzes limited feedback beamforming and precoded spatial multiplexing over temporally correlated channels. Assuming uncoordinated interference from one dominant interferer, using Markov chain convergence theory, the gain in the average successful throughput at the mobile user is shown to decrease exponentially with the feedback delay. The decay rate is amplified when the user is interference limited. Interference cancellation methods at the receiver are shown to mitigate the effect of interference. This work motivates the need for practical MIMO designs to overcome the adverse effects of interference. Second, limited feedback beamforming is analyzed on the downlink of a more realistic heterogeneous cellular network. Future generation cellular networks are expected to be heterogeneous, consisting of a mixture of macro base stations and low power nodes, to support the increasing user traffic capacity and reliability demand. Interference in heterogeneous environments cannot be coordinated using traditional interference mitigation techniques due to the on demand and random deployment of low power nodes such as femtocells. Using tools from stochastic geometry, the outage and average achievable rate of limited feedback MIMO is computed with same-tier and cross-tier interference, and feedback delay. A hybrid fixed and random network deployment model is used to analyze the performance in a fixed cell of interest. The maximum density of transmitting femtocells is derived as a function of the feedback rate and delay. The detrimental effect of same-tier interference is quantified, as the mobile user moves from the cell-center to the cell-edge. The third part of this dissertation considers limited coordination between randomly deployed transmitters. Building on the established degrading effect of uncoordinated interference on practical MIMO methods, and the analytical tractability of random deployment models, interference coordination is analyzed. Using multiple antennas at the transmitter for interference nulling in ad hoc networks is first shown to achieve MIMO gains using single antenna receivers. Clustered coordination is then investigated for cellular systems with randomly deployed base stations. As full coordination in the network is not feasible, a random clustering model is proposed where base stations located in the same cluster coordinate. The average achievable rate can be optimized as a function of the number of antennas to maximize the coordination gains. For multicell limited feedback, adaptive partitioning of feedback bits as a function of the signal and interference strength is proposed to minimize the loss in rate due to finite rate feedback. / text