Abstract
(English)
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The project aims to define and develop a metropolitan area, self-organizing and totally wireless network that we call Mobile Metropolitan Ad-hoc Network (MobileMAN). In a MobileMAN the users device are the network, no infrastructure is strictly required. A MobileMAN is finalized at providing, at a low cost and where and when is needed, the communication and interaction platform for people inside a man. It will support a kind of citizens network by which people could avoid the operators infrastructure (communication costs), thus increasing the society communication. Moreover, it has a very low cost-barrier for deploying a service on an experimental or temporary basis. This agility is especially important because it is not yet clear what services, business models and social behaviours are going to prove successful in a future pervasive computing environment.
Objectives:
This project investigates the potentialities of the Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET's) paradigm. Specifically, the project aims to define and develop a metropolitan area, self-organizing, and totally wireless network that we call Mobile Metropolitan Ad hoc Network (MobileMAN). The main technical outputs of this proposal can be summarized as follows:
i) Development, validation, implementation and testing of the architecture, and related protocols, for configuring and managing a MobileMAN. We conduct this research spanning all layers in the networking hierarchy. Our research combines advanced communications and networking research with basic research;
ii) Physical implementation of this architecture for lowers layers (i.e. wireless technologies). This will be done by improving the existing IEEE 802. 11 wireless technologies for dealing in bursty access environments as self-organized networks;
iii) Integration of applications on top of our self-organized network. iv) Validation of the self-organizing paradigm from the social and economic standpoint.
Work description:
The new technical, economic and social paradigm makes MANETs a challenging area in itself, which arises new challenging issues. However, even if this area is beginning to be widely researched, the current research is mainly based on traditional approaches. We strongly believe that traditional approaches cannot exploit all the characteristics of this area and that the new paradigm of MANETs requires new technical ideas for taking advantage of the potentialities of this new paradigm. We therefore propose a new approach based on the following key ideas:
i) Bursty-responsive MAC. In MANETs the channel burstiness comes either from bursty data transmission as in other mobile networks, as well as from (high-level) control messages. Therefore standards as the 802.11 cannot be adopted without collapsing the network. Our approach is, thus, to study and deploy a new exponential backoff scheme for stabilizing the network under bursty access condition;
ii) Social-operated Networking. Traditional MANETs routing does not exploit certain characteristic of these networks (e.g. cooperation and relationship among nodes). Our approach for the network layer is based on the social behaviour of people in real life. To this aim, the network is modelled as a small world graph, and nodes maintain routes not only to nodes discovered by the routing protocol (short connections), but also to other nodes (long connections) that are considered interesting to them;
iii) Security of all network functions to reduce the system sensitivity to node misbehavior and to stimulate the cooperation;
iv) The P2P paradigm of MANETs allows the development of services without using any central server, but using communications among nodes. Our approach is to introduce the cooperation as basis of the middleware services, in order to provide a collaborative environment to applications;
v) Evaluation of the social impact of the self-organizing paradigm by exploiting virtual communities of real users.
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