An Ad Hoc network is a wireless network without any stationary infrastructure of any kind. The nodes should be able to communicate with each other using wireless links, where a packet might traverse multiple links from the source to the destination. Every node in the network acts as a router, forwarding packet from one node to another. Since Ad Hoc networks are wireless and the nodes often battery driven, it is very important that the routing protocol in use can handle a large degree of node mobility and at the same time be very energy efficient. This is not an easy thing and a numerous routing protocols for wireless Ad Hoc networks have been proposed. Our goal was to simulate and make a literature study of three completely different routing protocols for wireless Ad Hoc networks: the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR), the Topology Dissemination Based on Reverse-Path Forwarding protocol (TBRPF), and the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP).

Small mobile devices with networking capabilities are becoming more and more readily available and used. These devices can be used to form mobile ad hoc networks to communicate, where no infrastructure for network communication exist or where it has been destroyed or is overloaded e.g. in a natural disaster such as a hurricane. Such networks are almost never fully connected, and are part of the category of delay/disruption-tolerant networks (DTN) and suffer from limited resources e.g. bandwidth, storage and limited energy supply. The Opportunistic DTN Routing With Window-aware Adaptive Replication (ORWAR) is a delaytolerant protocol intended to be used in disaster relief efforts or emergency operations were a DTN could be a fast way to establish communication. In these kinds of scenarios high success rate together with efficient usage of the networks resources are critical to the success of such operations. ORWAR has been implemented and simulated on a high-level simulator, with promising results. To make a better assessment about what ORWARs performance would be in a real world network, more realistic and detailed simulations are needed. This Master's Thesis describes the design, implementation and evaluation of ORWAR in the network simulator ns-3, which simulates networks down to physical layer. The contributions of this thesis is a extension to ns-3 giving it an framework with support for the bundle protocol and delay-tolerant routing protocols and an evaluation of the ORWAR performance using more detailed simulations. The simulations represent a city scenario in down-town Helsinki city, Finland, were pedestrians, cars and trams form a network to communicate. The simulations with a higher level of detail has added to insight about the protocol. The obtained results showed that the high-level simulation may be overly optimistic and hides implementation details. On the other hand, some assumptions were found to be too pessimistic. For example we have shown that ORWAR actually performs better than the high level simulations, with regard to partial transmissions and that the high-level simulations have rather optimistic assumptions regarding the latency.

The Aim of this thesis is to implement the "Opportunistic DTN Routing with Window-aware Adaptive Replication" (ORWAR) protocol on the Android platform.Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are particular mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) architectures that try to solve the issues related to the lack of point to point connectivity between the nodes of the network or between its sub-networks (partitions). The general approach is based on techniques of store-carry-forward of the messages whereby delivery can be achieved even in partitioned networks, though with mobility-dependent delays. DTNs can be considered as a means of communication for scenarios where infrastructure-based networks cannot be deployed or get dysfunctional for some reasons, such as in the case of a natural disaster or highly overloaded infrastructure. ORWAR is a DTN protocol that tries to exploit knowledge about the context of mobile nodes (speed, direction of movement and radio range) to estimate the size of a contact window in order to avoid the energy waste deriving from partial transmissions. This report presents the design and the implementation of the protocol on the Android platform. It then describes some functional tests together with an analysis of the energy consumption and the performance reachable on our test device Android Development Phone 1.

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile devices which dynamically form a temporary network, without using any existing network infrastructure or centralised administration. Each node in the network effectively becomes a router, and forwards packets towards the packet’s destination node. Ad hoc networks are characterized by frequently changing network topology, multi-hop wireless connections and the need for dynamic, efficient routing protocols. <p.This work considers the routing problem in a network of uniquely addressable sensors. These networks are encountered in many industrial applications, where the aim is to relay information from a collection of data gathering devices deployed over an area to central points. The routing problem in such networks are characterised by: <ul> <li>The overarching requirement for low power consumption, as battery powered sensors may be required to operate for years without battery replacement;</li> <li>An emphasis on reliable communication as opposed to real-time communication, it is more important for packets to arrive reliably than to arrive quickly; and</li> <li>Very scarce processing and memory resources, as these sensors are often implemented on small low-power microprocessors.</li> </ul> This work provides overviews of routing protocols in ad hoc networks, swarm intelligence, and swarm intelligence applied to ad hoc routing. Various mechanisms that are commonly encountered in ad hoc routing are experimentally evaluated under situations as close to real-life as possible. Where possible, enhancements to the mechanisms are suggested and evaluated. Finally, a routing protocol suitable for such low-power sensor networks is defined and benchmarked in various scenarios against the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) algorithm. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Computer Science / Unrestricted

The thesis deals with MANET networks and it focuses on the routing process. Most attention is paid to the routing protocols AODV and OLSR. These protocols are described in the detail. The aim of the thesis is to create a simulation model of MANET network in OPNET Modeler environment. In this model the AODV protocol is configured. In order to achieve improved characteristics of the network traffic the routing protocol parameters are optimized. Furthermore the process model of AODV protocol in this environment is studied and extended by a new type of message, which allows a transfer of current transmission speed of MANET station network interface. Current transmission rate of stations is retrieved from the statistics. Every station periodically sends a message to neighboring nodes. The node stores the information into the file when a new message arrives.

This thesis deals with the simulation of a Babel routing protocol. The goal is to create implementation of simulation model for OMNeT++ simulator. The text includes a description of the protocol and basic principles of computer network simulation in OMNeT++ environment using an INET library. Furthermore, the text discussed existing implementations and submits a proposal of a simulation model, followed by description of its implementation. Finally, the correctness of created model is verified.

The network simulation allows analysis of the computer networks behavior and configured protocols. This thesis focuses on the EIGRP routing protocol and its integration into the OMNeT++ simulation enviroment. The text includes a detailed description of the protocol and its configuration on Cisco devices. Furthermore, the text focuses on design of extension that supports routing protocol. The following describes implementation of the protocol according to design. Finally, the implemented solution is compared with the output of real devices.

Ad hoc wireless networks are increasingly being used to provide connectivity where a wired networking infrastructure is either unavailable or inaccessible. Many deployments utilize group communication, where several senders communicate with several receivers; multicasting has long been seen as an efficient way to provide this service. While there has been a great deal of research on multicast routing in ad hoc networks, relatively little attention has been paid to the design of multicast transport protocols, which provide reliability and congestion control. In this dissertation we design and implement a complete multicast transport architecture that includes both routing and transport protocols. Our multicast transport architecture has three modules: (a) a multicast routing and state setup protocol, (b) a mobility detection algorithm, and (c) a hop-by-hop transport protocol. The multicast routing and state setup protocol, called ASSM, is lightweight and receiver-oriented, making it both efficient and scalable. A key part of ASSM is its use of Source Specific Multicast semantics to avoid broadcasting when searching for sources. ASSM also uses routes provided by the unicast protocol to greatly reduce routing overhead. The second module, MDA, solves the problem of determining the cause of frame loss and reacting properly. Frame loss can occur due to contention, a collision, or mobility. Many routing protocols make the mistake of interpreting all loss as due to mobility, resulting in significant overhead when they initiate a repair that is not required. MDA enables routing protocols to react to frame loss only when necessary. The third module is a hop-by-hop multicast transport protocol, HCP. A hop-by-hop algorithm has a faster response time than that of an end-to-end algorithm, because it invokes congestion control at each hop instead of waiting for an end-to-end response. An important feature of HCP is that it can send data at different rates to receivers with different available bandwidth. We evaluate all three components of this architecture using simulations, demonstrating the improved performance, efficiency and scalability of our architecture as compared to other solutions.

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) is a new promising wireless technology which uses already available hardware and software components. This thesis proposes a routing algorithm for military applications. More specifically, a specialized scenario consisting of a network of flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) executing reconnaissance missions is investigated. The proposed routing algorithm is hybrid in nature and uses both reactive and proactive routing characteristics to transmit information. Through simulations run on a specially built stand alone simulator, based on Java, packet overhead, delivery ratio and latency metrics were monitored with respect to varying number of nodes, node density and mobility. The results showed that the high overhead leads to high delivery ratio while latency tends to increase as the network grows larger. All the metrics revealed sensitivity in high mobility conditions.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, a flying platform, are a promising wireless communications infrastructure with wide-ranging applications in both commercial and military domain. Owing to the appealing characteristics, such as high mobility, high feasibility, and low cost, UAV networks can be applied in various scenarios, such as emergency communications, cellular networks, device-to-device (D2D) networks, and sensor networks, regardless of infrastructure and spatial constraints. To handle complicated missions, provide wireless coverage for a large range, and have a long lifetime, a UAV network may consist of a large amount of UAVs, working cooperatively as a swarm, also referred to as swarm UAV networks. Although high mobility and numerous UAVs offer high flexibility, high scalability, and performance enhancement for swarm UAV networks, they also incur some technical challenges. One of the major challenges is the routing protocol design. With high mobility, a dynamic network topology may be encountered. As a result, traditional routing protocols based on routing path discovery are not applicable in swarm UAV networks, as the discovered routing path may be outdated especially when the amount of UAVs is large causing considerable routing path discovery delay. Multicast is an essential and key technology in the scenarios, where swarm UAV networks are employed as aerial small base station (BSs), like relay or micro BS. Swarm UAV networks consisting of a large amount of UAVs will encounter severe multicast delay with existing multicast methods using acknowledgement (ACK) feedback and retransmissions. This issue will be deteriorated when a swarm UAV network is deployed far away from BSs, causing high packet loss. Data exchange is another major technical challenge in swarm UAV networks, where UAVs exchange data packets with each other, such as requesting and retrieving lost packets. Due to numerous UAVs, data exchange between UAVs can cause message and signaling storm, resulting in a long data exchange delay and severe ovehead. In this dissertation, I focus on developing novel routing protocols, multicast schemes, and data exchange schemes, enabling efficient, robust, and high-performance routing, multicast, and data exchange in swarm UAV networks. To be specific, two novel flooding-based routing protocols are designed in this dissertation, where random network coding (RNC) is utilized to improve the efficiency of the flooding-based routing in swarm UAV networks without relying on network topology information and routing path discovery. Using the property of RNC that as long as sufficient different versions of encoded packets/generations are accumulated, original packets could be decoded, RNC is naturally able to accelerate the routing process. This is because the use of RNC can reduce the number of encoded packets that are required to be delivered in some hop. In a hop, the receiver UAV may have already overheard some generations in previous hops, so that it only needs to receive fewer generations from the transmitter UAV in the current hop. To further expedite the flooding-based routing, the second flooding-based routing protocol is designed, where each forwarding UAV creates a new version of generation by linearly combining received generations rather than by decode original packets. Despite the flooding-based routing significantly hastened by RNC, the inherent drawback of the flooding-based routing is still unsolved, namely numerous hops. Aiming at reducing the amount of hops, a novel enhanced flooding-based routing protocol leveraging clustering is designed, where the whole UAV network will be partitioned into multiple clusters and in each cluster only one UAV will be selected as the representative of this cluster, participating in the flooding-based routing process. By this way, the number of hops is restricted by the number of representatives, since packets are only flooded between limited representatives rather than numerous UAVs. To address the multicast issue in swarm UAV networks, a novel multicast scheme is proposed based on clustering, where a UAV experiencing packet loss will retrieve the lost packets by requesting other UAVs in the same cluster without depending on retransmissions of BSs. In this way, the lost packet retrieval is carried out through short-distance data exchange between UAVs with reliable transmissions and a short delay. Tractable stochastic geometry tools are used to model swarm UAV networks with a dynamic network topology, based on which comprehensive analytical performance analysis is given. To enable efficient data exchange between UAVs in swarm UAV networks, a data exchange scheme is proposed utilizing unsupervised learning. With the proposed scheme, all UAVs are assigned to multiple clusters and a UAV can only carry out data exchange within its cluster. By this way, UAVs in different clusters perform data exchange in a parallel fashion to expedite data exchange. The agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a type of unsupervised learning, is used to conduct clustering in order to guarantee that UAVs in the same cluster are able to supply and supplement each other's lost packets. Additionally, a data exchange mechanism, including a novel random backoff procedure, is designed, where the priorities of UAVs in data exchange determined by the number of their lost packets or requested packets that they can provide. As a result, each request-reply process would be taken fully advantage, maximally supplying lost packets not only to the UAV sending request, but also to other UAVs in the same cluster. For all the developed technologies in this dissertation, their technical details and the corresponding system procedures are designed based on low-complexity and well-developed technologies, such as the carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), for practicability in practice and without loss of generality. Moreover, extensive simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed and developed technologies. Additionally, system design insights are also explored and revealed through simulations. / Doctor of Philosophy / Compared to fixed infrastructures in wireless communications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks possess some significant advantages, such as low cost, high mobility, and high feasibility, making UAV networks have a wide range of applications in both military and commercial fields. However, some characteristics of UAV networks, including dynamic network topology and numerous UAVs, may become technical barriers for wireless communications. One of the major challenges is the routing protocol design. Routing is the process of selecting a routing path, enabling data delivered from a node (source) to another desired node (destination). Traditionally, routing is performed based on routing path discovery, where control packets are broadcasted and the path, on which a control packet first reaches the destination, will be selected as routing path. However, in UAV networks, routing path discovery may experience a long delay, as control packets go through many UAVs. Besides, the discovered routing path may be outdated, as the topology of UAV networks change over time. Another key technology in wireless communications that may not work well in UAV networks is multicast, where a transmitter, like a base station (BS), broadcasts data to UAVs and all UAVs are required to receive this data. With numerous UAVs, multicast delay may be severe, since the transmitter will keep retransmitting a data packet to UAVs until all UAVs successfully receive the packet. This issue will be deteriorated when a UAV network is deployed far away from BSs, causing high packet loss. Data exchange between UAVs is a fundamental and important system procedure in UAV networks. A large amount of UAV in a UAV network will cause serious data exchange delay, as many UAVs have to compete for limited wireless resources to request or send data. In this dissertation, I focus on developing novel technologies and schemes for swarm UAV networks, where a large amount of UAVs exist to make UAV networks powerful and handle complicated missions, enable efficient, robust, and high-performance routing, multicast, and data exchange system procedures. To be specific, two novel flooding-based routing protocols are designed, where random network coding (RNC) is utilized to improve the efficiency of flooding-based routing without relying on any network topology information or routing path discovery. The use of RNC could naturally expedite flooding-based routing process. With RNC, a receiver can decode original packets as long as it accumulates sufficient encoded packets, which may be sent by different transmitters in different hops. As a result, in some hops, fewer generations may be required to be transmitted, as receivers have already received and accumulated some encoded in previous hops. To further improve the efficiency of flooding-based routing, another routing protocol using RNC is designed, where UAVs create new encoded packets by linearly combining received encoded packets rather than linearly combing original packets. Apparently, this method would be more efficient. UAVs do not need to collect sufficient encoded packets and decode original packets, while only linearly combining all received encoded packets. Although RNC could effectively improve the efficiency of flooding-based routing, the inherent drawback is still unsolved, which is a large amount of hops caused by numerous UAVs. Thus, an enhanced flooding-based routing protocol using clustering is designed, where the whole UAV network will be partitioned into multiple clusters. In each cluster only one UAV will be selected as the representative of this cluster, participating in the flooding-based routing process. By this way, the number of hops could be greatly reduced, as packets are only flooded between limited representatives rather than numerous UAVs. To address the multicast issue in swarm UAV networks, a novel multicast scheme is proposed, where a UAV experiencing packet loss will retrieve its lost packets by requesting other UAVs in the same cluster without depending on retransmissions of BSs. In this way, the lost packet retrieval is carried out through short-distance data exchange between UAVs with reliable transmissions and a short delay. Then, the optimal number of clusters and the performance of the proposed multicast scheme are investigated by tractable stochastic geometry tools. If all UAVs closely stay together in a swarm UAV network, long data exchange delay would be significant technical issue, since UAVs will cause considerable interference to each other and all UAVs will compete for spectrum access. To cope with that, a data exchange scheme is proposed leveraging unsupervised learning. To avoid interference between UAVs and a long-time waiting for spectrum access, all UAVs are assigned to multiple clusters and different clusters use different frequency bands to carry out data exchange simultaneously. The agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a type of unsupervised learning, is used to conduct clustering, guaranteeing that UAVs in the same cluster are able to supply and supplement each other's lost packets. Additionally, a data exchange mechanism is designed, facilitating that a UAV with more lost packets or more requested packets has a higher priority to carry out data exchange. In this way, each request-reply process would be taken fully advantage, maximally supplying lost packets not only to the UAV sending request, but also to other UAVs in the same cluster. For all the developed technologies in this dissertation, their technical details and the corresponding system procedures are designed based on low-complexity and well-developed technologies, such as the carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), for practicability in reality and without loss of generality. Moreover, extensive simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the developed technologies. Additionally, system design insights are also explored and revealed through simulations.