In this paper, a novel air-interface is presented for Fleet-Net1, a self-organizing network for inter-vehicle and vehicle-toroadsidecommunication. The air-interface is based upon the lowchip-rate version of UMTS/TDD. To adapt the cellular UMTS standard to an air-interface for ad hoc networks, changes of the physical layer, medium access control sub-layer and radio resource management are required. An overview of the required modifications is given here. Particularly, a decentralized synchronization mechanism is presented and analyzed by means of simulations. Furthermore, changes for the medium access control are explained in detail, which allow for an efficient operation in partly meshed networks and prioritization. Performance results of the overall system considering throughput and delay are derived by means of analytical evaluations and event-driven simulations. Based on realistic mobility models, it is shown that the presented solution provides a robust communication platform even in vehicular environments. The proposed air-interface is a cost-effective solution not only for inter-vehicle communication, but also for ad hoc networking in general, benefiting from the mass-market of UMTS.

Wireless local area networks have known an increasing popularity during the past few years. However, as new user applications diverge from the traditional data-centric model, the introduction of efficient, QoS aware medium access methods becomes of utmost importance. EY-NPMA is a medium access protocol belonging to the contention paradigm that provides support for service differentiation and low collision rates. In this paper, we address a shortcoming of EY-NPMA as indicated by previous studies, namely the insensitivity of the protocol to different working conditions. In this work, we study and evaluate a mechanism that allows a network employing EY-NPMA to adapt its operating parameters according to the offered load. Simulation studies further document and confirm the positive characteristics of the proposed mechanism.

In this paper, we explore the utility of recently discovered multiple-antenna techniques (namely MIMO techniques) for medium access control (MAC) design and routing in mobile ad hoc networks. Specifically, we focus on ad hoc networks where the spatial diversity technique is used to combat fading and achieve robustness in the presence of user mobility. We first examine the impact of spatial diversity on the MAC design, and devise a MIMO MAC protocol accordingly. We then develop analytical methods to characterize the corresponding saturation throughput for MIMO multi-hop networks. Building on the throughout analysis, we study the impact of MIMO MAC on routing. We characterize the optimal hop distance that minimizes the end-to-end delay in a large network. For completeness, we also study MAC design using directional antennas for the case where the channel has a strong line of sight (LOS) component. Our results show that the spatial diversity technique and the directional antenna technique can enhance the performance of mobile ad hoc networks significantly.

We study the problem of controlling data overhead of mesh-based multicast ad hoc routing protocols by adaptively adding redundancy to the minimal data overhead multicast mesh as required by the network conditions. We show that the computation of the minimal data overhead multicast mesh is NP-complete, and we propose an heuristic approximation algorithm inspired on epidemic algorithms. In addition, we propose a mobility-aware and adaptive mesh construction algorithm based on a probabilistic path selection being able to adapt the reliability of the multicast mesh to the mobility of the network. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach, when implemented into ODMRP, is able to offer similar performance results and a lower average latency while reducing data overhead between 25 to 50% compared to the original ODMRP.

Scalability is one of the toughest challenges in ad hoc networking. Recent work outlines theoretical bounds on how well routing protocols could scale in this environment. However, none of the popular routing solutions really scales to large networks, by coming close enough to these bounds. In this paper, we study the case of link state routing and OLSR, one of the strongest candidates for standardization. We analyze how these bounds are not reached in this case, and we study how much the scalability is enhanced with the use of Fish eye techniques in addition to the link state routing framework. We show that with this enhancement, the theoretical scalability bounds are reached.

In this paper, we study how to achieve the maximum capacity under delay constraints for large mobile wireless networks. We develop a systematic methodology for studying this problem in the asymptotic region when the number of nodes n in the network is large. We first identify a number of key parameters for a large class of scheduling schemes, and investigate the inherent tradeoffs among the capacity, the delay, and these scheduling parameters. Based on these inherent tradeoffs, we are able to compute the upper bound on the maximum per-node capacity of a large mobile wireless network under given delay constraints. Further, in the process of proving the upper bound, we are able to identify the optimal values of the key scheduling parameters. Knowing these optimal values, we can then develop scheduling schemes that achieve the upper bound up to some logarithmic factor, which suggests that our upper bound is fairly tight. We have applied this methodology to both the i.i.d. mobility model and the random way-point mobility model. In both cases, our methodology allows us to develop new scheduling schemes that can achieve larger capacity than previous proposals under the same delay constraints. In particular, for the i.i.d. mobility model, our scheme can achieve (n-1/3/log3/2 n) per-node capacity with constant delay. This demonstrates that, under the i.i.d. mobility model, mobility increases the capacity even with constant delays. Our methodology can also be extended to incorporate additional scheduling constraints.

An ad hoc network is a multi-hop wireless network. Its limited bandwidth and frequently changing topology require that its protocol should be robust, simple, and energy conserving. We have proposed PoolODMRP to reduce its control overhead greatly by its one-hop local route maintenance. However, PoolODMRP still has some shortcomings. In this paper, we propose PDAODMRP (passive data acknowledgement ODMRP) to extend PoolODMRP. Compared with PoolODMRP, PDAODMRP has the following contributions: (1) It knows the status of its downstream forwarding nodes by route information collected from data packets instead of BEACON signal of MAC layer; (2) it max simplifies the route information collected from data packets by pool nodes; (3) it adopts a dynamic local route maintenance to enforce its local route maintenance; (4) it adopts the route evaluation policy of NSMP (neighbor supporting multicast protocol). Compared with PoolODMRP, PDAODMRP has lower control overhead, lower data delivery delay, and lower data overhead.

In ad hoc networks, loss-based congestion window progression by the traditional means of duplicate ACKs and timeouts causes high network buffer utilization due to large bursts of data, thereby degrading network bandwidth utilization. Moreover, network-oriented feedbacks to handle route disconnection events may impair packet forwarding capability by adding to MAC layer congestion and also dissipate considerable network resources at reluctant intermediate nodes. Here, we propose a new TCP scheme that does not require the participation of intermediate nodes. It is a purely end-to-end scheme using TCP timestamps to deduce link conditions. It also eliminates spurious reductions of the transmission window in cases of timeouts and fast retransmits. The scheme incorporates a receiver-oriented rate controller (rater), and a congestion window delimiter for the 802.11 MAC protocol. In addition, the transient nature of medium availability due to medium contention during the connection time is addressed by a freezing timer (freezer) at the receiver, which freezes the sender whenever heavy contention is perceived. Finally, the sender-end is modified to comply with the receiver-end enhancements, as an optional deployment. Simulation studies show that our modification of TCP for ad hoc networks offers outstanding performance in terms of goodput, as well as throughput.

One of the main problems associated with MANETs is that mobility and the associated route discovery and maintenance procedures of reactive routing protocols cause severe interruptions on real-time video streams. Some of these interruptions are too large to be concealed using any sort of video technology, resulting in communications breaks unpleasant for the final end user. We present a solution for enhanced video transmission that increases route stability by using an improved route discovery process based on the DSR routing protocol, along with traffic splitting algorithms and a preventive route discovery mechanism. We also present some video adaptative mechanisms that improve the overall performance of multipath routing in terms of video data replication and video packet splitting strategies. Combining our proposals, we achieve up to 97% less interruptions on communication with high mobility and over 1.2 dB of improvements in terms of video distortion.

Location management is difficult in ad hoc networks due to many features such as the lack of a wired infrastructure, the scarce energy, memory and processing capabilities of nodes, and nodes’ movement which leads to a dynamic topology. These characteristics make the location management schemes designed for mobile cellular networks inefficient for ad hoc networks. New solutions for location management have therefore been proposed in the literature in the recent past. In this paper, a taxonomy of location management strategies is presented; some of the more interesting approaches proposed in the literature are critically discussed, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages.