Mobile devices are often expected to perform computational tasks that may be beyond their processing or battery capability. Cloud computing techniques have been proposed as a means to offload a mobile device's computation to more powerful resources. In this thesis, we consider the case where powerful computing resources are made available by utilizing vehicles. These vehicles can be repositioned in real time to receive computational tasks from user-carried devices. They can be either equipped with rugged high-performance computers to provide both computation and communication service, or they can be simple message ferries that facilitate communication with a more powerful computing resource. These scenarios find application in challenged environments and may be used in a military or disaster relief settings. It is further enabled by increasing feasibility of (i) constructing a Mobile High Performance Computer (MHPC) using rugged computer hardware with form factors that can be deployed in vehicles and (ii) Message Ferries (MF) that provide communication service in disruption tolerant networks. By analogy to prior work on message ferries and data mules, one can refer to the use of our first schema, MHPCs, as computational ferrying. After illustrating and motivating the computational ferrying concept, we turn our attention into the challenges facing such a deployment. These include the well known challenges of operating an opportunistic and intermittently connected network using message ferries -- such as devising an efficient mobility plan for MHPCs and developing techniques for proximity awareness. In this thesis, first we propose an architecture for the system components to be deployed on the mobile devices and the MHPCs. We then focus on defining and solving the MHPC movement scheduling problem with sufficient generality to describe a number of plausible deployment scenarios. After thorough examination of the MHPC concepts, we propose a scheme in which MHPCs are downgraded to be simple MFs that instead provide communication to a stationary HPC with powerful computing resources. Similar to the MPHCs, we provide a framework for this problem and then describe heuristics to solve it. We conduct a number of experiments that provide an understanding of how the performance of the system using MHPCs or MFs is affected by various parameters. We also provide a thorough comparison of the system in the dimensions of Computation on the Move and Controlling the Mobility.

Collecting data from sensor nodes to designated sinks is a common and challenging task in a wide variety of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, ranging from animal monitoring to security surveillance. A number of approaches exploiting sink mobility have been proposed in recent years: some are proactive, in that sensor nodes push their read- ings to storage nodes from where they are collected by roaming mobile sinks, whereas others are reactive, in that mobile sinks pull readings from nearby sensor nodes as they traverse the sensor network. In this thesis, we point out that deciding which data collection approach is more energy-efficient depends on application characteristics, includ- ing the mobility patterns of sinks and the desired latency of collected data. We introduce novel adaptive data collection schemes that are able to automatically adjust to changing sink visiting patterns or data requirements, thereby significantly easing the deployment of a WSN. We illustrate cases where combining proactive and reactive modes of data collection is particularly beneficial. This motivates the design of TwinRoute, a novel hybrid algorithm that can flexibly mix the two col- lection modes at appropriate levels depending on the application sce- nario. Our extensive experimental evaluation, which uses synthetic and real-world sink traces, allows us to identify scenario characteristics that suit proactive, reactive or hybrid data collection schemes. It shows that TwinRoute outperforms the pure approaches in most scenarios, achiev- ing desirable tradeoffs between communication cost and timely delivery of sensor data.

Submitted by Eric das Neves (evndeveloper@hotmail.com) on 2018-12-11T00:13:26Z No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação Versão Secretaria com ficha catalografica e folha de aprovação.pdf: 3156070 bytes, checksum: 27dc73ab25f883f2c6bd2faed11dd6e6 (MD5) 316 ATA de Defesa - Eric Vieira (Assinado).pdf: 478934 bytes, checksum: 8297a92876a93d2002070fab8e573ab2 (MD5) carta deposito.jpg: 881630 bytes, checksum: 1f98e977c3f922663009b11ea05b470a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Secretaria PPGI (secretariappgi@icomp.ufam.edu.br) on 2018-12-12T01:14:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação Versão Secretaria com ficha catalografica e folha de aprovação.pdf: 3156070 bytes, checksum: 27dc73ab25f883f2c6bd2faed11dd6e6 (MD5) 316 ATA de Defesa - Eric Vieira (Assinado).pdf: 478934 bytes, checksum: 8297a92876a93d2002070fab8e573ab2 (MD5) carta deposito.jpg: 881630 bytes, checksum: 1f98e977c3f922663009b11ea05b470a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2018-12-12T13:54:35Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação Versão Secretaria com ficha catalografica e folha de aprovação.pdf: 3156070 bytes, checksum: 27dc73ab25f883f2c6bd2faed11dd6e6 (MD5) 316 ATA de Defesa - Eric Vieira (Assinado).pdf: 478934 bytes, checksum: 8297a92876a93d2002070fab8e573ab2 (MD5) carta deposito.jpg: 881630 bytes, checksum: 1f98e977c3f922663009b11ea05b470a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-12-12T13:54:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação Versão Secretaria com ficha catalografica e folha de aprovação.pdf: 3156070 bytes, checksum: 27dc73ab25f883f2c6bd2faed11dd6e6 (MD5) 316 ATA de Defesa - Eric Vieira (Assinado).pdf: 478934 bytes, checksum: 8297a92876a93d2002070fab8e573ab2 (MD5) carta deposito.jpg: 881630 bytes, checksum: 1f98e977c3f922663009b11ea05b470a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-10-18 / Delay Tolerant Networks have emerged as a solution for communication in scenarios where the Internet does not have its basic premises met for proper operation. DTNs rely directly on their nodes for good performance because it uses the mobility of nodes to send messages to their destinations. However, due to factors such as resource economy, lack of interest in the message or simply the denial of collaboration, it negatively affects network performance. In this way, it is fundamental to consider the social factors, extended from the users to the network nodes, so that the best forwarding strategy is found, increasing the chances of delivering the messages. In this work a new protocol is proposed for the dissemination of messages in DTN networks, using the interests of the network nodes for the formation of level’s message passing. These levels are formed by grouping the nodes through machine learning techniques, KMEANS and EM clusters, according to the level of interest of the nodes by the message generated, directly or indirectly, passing the message by the groups formed up to the recipient of the node. Our results show that the proposal is promising, having superior results to the protocols well qualified in the literature. / As redes tolerantes a atrasos e desconexões surgiram como uma solução para a comunicação em cenários onde a internet não possui suas premissas básicas atendidas: conexão fim-afim, baixa latência e pouca perda de pacotes. As DTNs dependem diretamente da colaboração de seus nós para um bom desempenho, pois usa a mobilidade dos mesmos para fazer os repasses das mensagens até seus destinos. Entretanto, devido a fatores como economia de recursos: energia, armazenamento de dados, pouco interesse pela mensagem ou simplesmente a negação da colaboração, afeta de forma negativa o desempenho da rede. Dessa maneira é fundamental que se leve em consideração fatores sociais, que podem ser estendidos dos usuários e empregados aos nós da rede, para que se possa encontrar a melhor estratégia de repasses, aumentando as chances de entrega das mensagens. Portanto, este trabalho propõe um novo protocolo de disseminação de mensagens em redes DTN, usando os interesses dos nós da rede como fator social, para a formação de níveis de repasse de mensagens. Utilizou-se técnicas de aprendizagem de máquina para a formação dos níveis, que usam clusterizadores como o KMEANS e EM para agrupar os nós de acordo com o nível de interesse pela mensagem gerada, direto ou indireto. Dessa forma a mensagem é repassada através dos grupos formados até o nó destinatário. Resultados obtidos através de um conjunto de experimentos criteriosamente selecionados mostram que a proposta é promissora, apresentando um desempenho superior aos protocolos bem conhecidos da literatura.

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>

Billions of people in the world live under heavy information censorship. We propose a new class of delay tolerant network (DTN), known as a censorship tolerant network (CTN), to counter the growing practice of Internet-based censorship. CTNs should provide strict guarantees on the privacy of both information shared within the network and the identities of network participants. CTN software needs to be publicly available as open source software and run on personal mobile devices with real-world computational, storage, and energy constraints. We show that these simple assumptions and system constraints have a non-obvious impact on the design and implementation of CTNs, and serve to differentiate our system design from previous work. We design data routing within a CTN using a new paradigm: one where nodes operate selfishly to maximize their own utility, make decisions based only on their own observations, and only communicate with nodes they trust. We introduce the Laissez-faire framework, an incentivized approach to CTN routing. Laissez-faire does not mandate any specific routing protocol, but requires that each node implement tit-for-tat by keeping track of the data exchanged with other trusted nodes. We propose several strategies for valuing and retrieving content within a CTN. We build a prototype BlackBerry implementation and conduct both controlled lab and field trials, and show how each strategy adapts to different network conditions. We further demonstrate that, unlike existing approaches to routing, Laissez-faire prevents free-riding. We build an efficient and reliable data transport protocol on top of the Short Message Service (SMS) to serve a control channel for the CTN. We conduct a series of experiments to characterise SMS behaviour under bursty, unconventional workloads. This study examines how variables such as the transmission order, delay between transmissions, the network interface used, and the time-of-day affect the service. We present the design and implementation of our transport protocol. We show that by adapting to the unique channel conditions of SMS we can reduce message overheads by as much as 50\% and increase data throughput by as much as 545% over the approach used by existing applications. A CTN's dependency on opportunistic communication imposes a significant burden on smartphone energy resources. We conduct a large-scale user study to measure the energy consumption characteristics of 20100 smartphone users. Our dataset is two orders of magnitude larger than any previous work. We use this dataset to build the Energy Emulation Toolkit (EET) that allows developers to evaluate the energy consumption requirements of their applications against real users' energy traces. The EET computes the successful execution rate of energy-intensive applications across all users, specific devices, and specific smartphone user-types. We also consider active adaptation to energy constraints. By classifying smartphone users based on their charging characteristics we demonstrate that energy level can be predicted within 72% accuracy a full day in advance, and through an Energy Management Oracle energy intensive applications, such as CTNs, can adapt their execution to maintain the operation of the host device.

IEEE 802.11 PHY supports multiple transmission rates according to multiple different modulations and coding schemes. Each WiFi station selects its own transmission rate according to its own algorithm; in particular, the IEEE 802.11 standards do not specify the bit-rate selection method. Although many adaptive bit-rate selection algorithms have been proposed, there is limited research and evaluation on the performance of such algorithms for roadside networks, especially in cases with multi-vehicle roadside multi-vehicular WiFi networks. In this thesis we propose an opportunistic highest bit-rate algorithm, Opportunistic Highest Bit-Rate Multi-Vehicular WiFi Networks (OHBR-MVN), specifically for roadside multi-vehicular WiFi networks. Our proposal is based on three key characteristics of such networks: (1) vehicles will drive closer to, and eventually pass, the roadside WiFi station, experiencing a progressively better transmission environment; (2) the vast majority of data transmitted in single-vehicle drive-by downloading scenarios occurs at the maximum transmission rate; (3) vehicles that transmit at less than the maximum rate do so at the expense of those that could send more data at a higher transmission rate. We therefore believe that transmitting only at the highest possible bit-rate is the preferred algorithm for such networks. Further, this approach keeps the bit-rate selection extremely simple, avoiding the complexity and resulting problems of adaptive approaches. Through a series of experiments that compare the throughput of both fixed and adaptive bit-rate selection algorithms we show that our approach yields both higher throughput and better fairness characteristics, while being significantly simple, and thus more robust.

The delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is characterized by frequent disconnections and long delays of links among devices due to mobility, sparse deployment of devices, attacks, and noise, etc. Considerable research efforts have been devoted recently to DTNs enabling communications between network entities with intermittent connectivity. Unfortunately, mobile devices have limited energy capacity, and the fundamental problem is that traditional power-saving mechanisms are designed assuming well connected networks. Due to much larger inter-contact durations than contact durations, devices spend most of their life time in the neighbor discovery, and centralized power-saving strategies are difficult. Consequently, mobile devices consume a significant amount of energy in the neighbor discovery, rather than in infrequent data transfers. Therefore, distributed energy efficient neighbor discovery protocols for DTNs are essential to minimize the degradation of network connectivity and maximize the benefits from mobility. In this thesis, we develop sleep scheduling protocols in the medium access control (MAC) layer that are adaptive and distributed under different clock synchronization conditions: synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-asynchronous. In addition, we propose a distributed clock synchronization protocol to mitigate the clock synchronization problem in DTNs. Our research accomplishments are briefly outlined as follows: Firstly, we design an adaptive exponential beacon (AEB) protocol. By exploiting the trend of contact availability, beacon periods are independently adjusted by each device and optimized using the distribution of contact durations. The AEB protocol significantly reduces energy consumption while maintaining comparable packet delivery delay and delivery ratio. Secondly, we design two asynchronous clock based sleep scheduling (ACDS) protocols. Based on the fact that global clock synchronization is difficult to achieve in general, predetermined patterns of sleep schedules are constructed using hierarchical arrangements of cyclic difference sets such that devices independently selecting different duty cycle lengths are still guaranteed to have overlapping awake intervals with other devices within the communication range. Thirdly, we design a distributed semi-asynchronous sleep scheduling (DSA) protocol. Although the synchronization error is unavoidable, some level of clock accuracy may be possible for many practical scenarios. The sleep schedules are constructed to guarantee contacts among devices having loosely synchronized clocks, and parameters are optimized using the distribution of synchronization error. We also define conditions for which the proposed semi-asynchronous protocol outperforms existing asynchronous sleep scheduling protocols. Lastly, we design a distributed clock synchronization (DCS) protocol. The proposed protocol considers asynchronous and long delayed connections when exchanging relative clock information among nodes. As a result, smaller synchronization error achieved by the proposed protocol allows more accurate timing information and renders neighbor discovery more energy efficient. The designed protocols improve the lifetime of mobile devices in DTNs by means of energy efficient neighbor discoveries that reduce the energy waste caused by idle listening problems.

<p>Technology has reached a point where it has become feasible to develop unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), that is aircraft without a human pilot on board. Given that future UAVs can be autonomous and cheap, applications of swarming UAVs are possible. In this thesis we have studied a reconnaissance application using swarming UAVs and how these UAVs can communicate the reconnaissance data. To guide the UAVs in their reconnaissance mission we have proposed a pheromone based mobility model that in a distributed manner guides the UAVs to areas not recently visited. Each UAV has a local pheromone map that it updates based on its reconnaissance scans. The information in the local map is regularly shared with a UAV’s neighbors. Evaluations have shown that the pheromone logic is very good at guiding the UAVs in their cooperative reconnaissance mission in a distributed manner.</p><p>Analyzing the connectivity of the UAVs we found that they were heavily partitioned which meant that contemporaneous communication paths generally were not possible to establish. This means that traditional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols like AODV, DSR and GPSR will generally fail. By using node mobility and the store-carry-forward principle of delay-tolerant routing the transfer of messages between nodes is still possible. In this thesis we propose location aware routing for delay-tolerant networks (LAROD). LAROD is a beacon-less geographical routing protocol for intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks. Using static destinations we have shown by a comparative study that LAROD has almost as good delivery rate as an epidemic routing scheme, but at a substantially lower overhead.</p> / Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2008:14

With the growth of Internet, the underlying protocols are increasingly challenged by new technologies and applications. The original Internet protocols were, however, not designed for wireless communication, mobility, long disconnection times, and varying bandwidths. In this thesis, we study challenged networking, and how well old and new protocols operate under such constraints. Our study is experimental. We build network testbeds and measure the performance of alternative protocols and architectures. We develop novel methodologies for repeatable experiments that combine emulations, simulations and real world experiments. Based on our results we suggest modifications to existing protocols, and we also develop a new network architecture that matches the constraints of a challenged network, in our case, an opportunistic network. One of our most important contributions is an Ad hoc Protocol Evaluation (APE) testbed. It has been successfully used worldwide. The key to its success is that it significantly lowers the barrier to repeatable experiments involving wireless and mobile computing devices. Using APE, we present side-by-side performance comparisons of IETF MANET routing protocols. A somewhat surprising result is that some ad hoc routing protocols perform a factor 10 worse in the testbed than predicted by a common simulation tool (ns-2). We find that this discrepancy is mainly related to the protocols’ sensing abilities, e.g., how accurately they can infer their neighborhood in a real radio environment. We propose and implement improvements to these protocols based on the results. Our novel network architecture Haggle is another important contribution. It is based on content addressing and searching. Mobile devices in opportunistic networks exchange content whenever they detect each other. We suggest that the exchange should be based on interests and searches, rather than on destination names and addresses. We argue that content binding should be done late in challenged networks, something which our search approach supports well.

Mobile Delay Tolerant Networks (MDTNs) are wireless mobile networks in which a complete routing path between two nodes that wish to communicate cannot be guaranteed. A number of networking scenarios have been categorized as MDTNs, such as vehicular ad hoc networks, pocket switched networks, etc. The network asynchrony, coupled with the limited resources of mobile devices make message dissemination (also called routing) one of the fundamental challenges in MDTNs. In the literature, a large body of work has been done to deal with routing in MDTNs. However, most of the existing routing protocols are based on at least one of the following three assumptions: (1) all messages can be routed by relying on a single mobility property; (2) all messages can be routed using a single message allocation strategy; (3) users are willing to disclose their mobility information and relationships to others in order to improve the quality of the routing. We argue that the above three assumptions are not realistic because: (1) users can exhibit various social behaviors and consequently various mobility properties (e.g., they can have regular movements during week-days and exhibit non-predictable movements during week-ends); (2) some messages might need more or less copies to be delivered according to the localization of the source and the destination and to the urgency of the message; and (3) users mobility data can disclose sensitive information about the users. In this thesis, we relieve MDTN routing from the above three restrictive assumptions. Firstly, we propose an adaptive routing protocol for mobile delay tolerant networks. The proposed protocol can dynamically learn the social properties of nodes based on their mobility patterns, and exploit the most appropriate routing strategy each time an intermediate node is encountered. Simulations performed on real mobility traces show that our protocol achieves a better delivery ratio than existing state-of-the-art routing protocols that rely on a single mobility property. Secondly, we present a delay and cost balancing protocol for efficient routing in mobile delay tolerant networks. The presented protocol reasons on the remaining time-to-live of a message to dynamically allocate the minimum number of copies that are necessary to achieve a given delivery probability. Evaluation results show that the protocol can achieve a good balance between message delivery delay and delivery cost, compared with most of the existing routing protocols in the literature. Lastly, we propose an efficient privacy preserving prediction-based routing protocol for mobile delay tolerant networks. This protocol preserves the mobility patterns of a node from being disclosed by exploiting the mobility pattern of communities that node belongs to. Evaluation results demonstrate that this protocol can obtain comparable routing performance to prediction-based protocols while preserving the mobility pattern of nodes.