Currently, NDN-based VANETs protocols have several problems with packet overhead of rebroadcasting, control packet, and the accuracy of next-hop selection due to the dynamic topology. To deal with these problems in this paper, we propose a robust and lightweight forwarding protocol in Vehicular ad-hoc Named Data Networking. The concept of our forwarding protocol is adopting a packet-free approach. A vehicle collects its neighbor's visual identification by a pair of cameras (front and rear) to assign a unique visual ID for each node. Based on these IDs, we construct a hop-by-hop FIB-based forwarding strategy effectively. Furthermore, the Face duplication [1] in the wireless environment causes an all-broadcast problem. We add the visual information to Face to distinguish the incoming and outgoing Face to prevent broadcast-storm and make FIB and PIT work more accurate and efficiently. The performance evaluation results focusing on the communication overhead show that our proposal has better results in overall network traffic costs and Interest satisfaction ratio than previous works.

Cooperative communication can reduce energy consumption effectively due to its superior diversity gain. To further prolong network lifetime and improve the energy efficiency, this paper studies energy-efficient packet transmission in wireless ad-hoc networks and proposes a novel cluster-based cooperative packet transmission (CCPT) protocol to mitigate the packet loss and balance the energy consumption of networks. The proposed CCPT protocol first constructs a highly energy-efficient initial routing path based on the required energy cost of non-cooperative transmission. Then an iterative cluster recruitment algorithm is proposed that selects cooperative nodes and organizing them into clusters, which can create transmit diversity in each hop of communication. Finally, a novel two-step cluster-to-cluster cooperative transmission scheme is designed, where all cluster members cooperatively forward the packet to the next-hop cluster. Simulation results show that the CCPT protocol effectively reduces the energy cost and prolongs the network lifetime compared with the previous CwR and noC schemes. The results also have shown that the proposed CCPT protocol outperforms the traditional CwR protocol in terms of transmit efficiency per energy, which indicates that CCPT protocol has achieved a better trade-off between energy and packet arrival ratio.

In the evolution of wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, and delay/disruption tolerant networks, the Store-Carry-Forward (SCF) message relaying paradigm has been commonly featured and studied with much attention. SCF networking is essential for offsetting the deficiencies of intermittent and range limited communication environments because it allows moving wireless communication nodes to act as “mobile relay nodes”. Such relay nodes can store/carry/process messages, wait for a better opportunity for transmission, and finally forward the messages to other nodes. This paper starts with a short overview of SCF routing and then examines two SCF networking scenarios. The first one deals with large content delivery across multiple islands using existing infrastructural transportation networks (e.g., cars and ferries) in which mobility is uncontrollable from an SCF viewpoint. Simulations show how a simple coding technique can improve flooding-based SCF. The other scenario looks at a prototype system of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for high-quality video surveillance from the sky in which mobility is partially controllable from an SCF viewpoint. Three requisite techniques in this scenario are highlighted - fast link setup, millimeter wave communications, and use of multiple links. Through these examples, we discuss the benefits and issues of the practical use of SCF networking-based systems.

Autonomous ad hoc networks are networks with nodes belonging to different authorities, and cooperative behavior of nodes is not guaranteed in such networks. In this paper, defense mechanisms are introduced to protect nodes against injecting traffic attacks in an autonomous ad hoc network, and to stimulate nodes to forward packets for each other. We have a cross-layer approach in the design of our mechanisms, and nodes use information from medium access control (MAC) layer for selecting a good route. In addition, nodes attempt to drop packets of those nodes that violate MAC layer backoff mechanism. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanisms in the presence of injecting traffic attacks and MAC layer misbehaviors in an ad hoc network that consists of selfish nodes.

Time synchronization is important for frequency hopping, power management, scheduling, and basic operations of multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The main problem of existing time synchronization methods is that they depend on a particular node that has the fastest time information among neighbor nodes. The Cucker-Smale flocking model describes that global emergent behavior can be obtained by locally averaging the velocity of each bird. Inspired by this flocking model, we propose a time synchronization method not depending on a particular node. In the proposed method, each node revises its time information via the local-averaging procedure in a distributed manner. A self-correcting procedure is added to the proposed method in order to preserve the effect of time adjustment executed by the local-averaging procedure. The simulation results show that the proposed time synchronization method reduces the time difference among nodes, and enhances the performance of time synchronization in the context of IEEE 802.11-based ad-hoc networks.

Reliable broadcasting in vehicular ad-hoc networks is challenging due to their unique characteristics including intermittent connectivity and various vehicular scenarios. Applications and services in intelligent transportation systems need an efficient, fast and reliable broadcasting protocol especially for safety and emergency applications. In our previous work, we have proposed DECA, a new reliable broadcasting protocol which suits such characteristics. To address the issue of various vehicular scenarios, our protocol performs beaconing to gather local density information of 1-hop neighbors and uses such information to adapt its broadcasting decision dynamically. Specifically, before broadcasting a message, a node selects a neighbor with the highest density and adds the selected neighbor's identifier to the message. Upon receiving of a broadcast message, each node checks whether or not it is the selected neighbor. If so, it is responsible for rebroadcasting the message immediately. This mechanism can raise the data dissemination speed of our protocol so that it is as fast as simple flooding. To address the issue of intermittent connectivity, identifiers of broadcast messages are added into beacons. This helps nodes to check if there are any broadcast messages that have not yet been received. In this paper, we propose DECA with a new beaconing algorithm and a new waiting timeout calculation, so-called DECA-bewa. Our new protocol can reduce redundant retransmissions and overall overhead in high density areas. The protocol performance is evaluated on the network simulator (NS-2). Simulation results show that DECA-bewa outperforms existing protocols in terms of reliability, overhead and speed of data dissemination.

An ad hoc network is a decentralized network that consists of mobile nodes with wireless communication devices without the aid of access points. A Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is one of the representative applications of the ad hoc network. Epidemic routing has been proposed as a routing protocol based on Store-Carry-Forward mechanism for VANET environment. However, in Epidemic Routing, network resources such as packet buffer of a node are significantly consumed because data packets are spread across the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a new autonomous clustering-based data transfer scheme using positions and moving direction of vehicles for VANETs. The autonomous clustering configures multiple clusters in the network and then only the cluster head that manages the cluster stores data packets. Whenever the cluster meets a new cluster, the cluster head of the cluster decides whether it should forward data packets to the new cluster based on its own position, the destination node's position, and moving direction of the cluster. Finally, this paper presents the simulation results to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks), there are two kinds of routing methods: proactive and reactive. Each has different characteristics and advantages. The latter generally employs the flooding technique to finding a routing path to the destination. However, flooding has big overheads caused by broadcasting RREQ packets to the entire network. Therefore, reducing this overhead is really needed to enable several network efficiencies. Previous studies introduced many approaches which are mainly concerned with the restriction of flooding. However, they usually configure the detailed routing path in the forward flooding procedure and ignore the factors causing the flooding overheads. In this paper, we propose the FSRS (First Search and Reverse Setting) routing protocol which is a new approach in flooding techniques and a new paradigm shift. FSRS is based on cluster topology and is composed of two main mechanisms: inter-cluster and intra-cluster flooding. Inter-cluster routing floods RREQ packets between cluster units and sets a cluster path. When the destination node receives the RREQ packet, it floods RREP packets to an intra-cluster destination which is a gateway to relay the RREP packet to a previous cluster. This is called intra-cluster routing. So to speak, a specific routing path configuration progresses in the RREP process through the reverse cluster path. Consequently, FSRS is a new kind of hybrid protocol well adapted to wireless ad-hoc networks. This suggests a basic wireless networking architecture to make a dynamic cluster topology in future work. In the simulation using NS-2, we compare it to several other protocols and verify that FSRS is a powerful protocol. In the result of the simulation, FSRS conserves energy by a maximum of 12% compared to HCR.

In OLSR, only selected multipoint relays (MPRs) are allowed to forward broadcast data during the flooding process, which reduces the message propagation overhead compared to the classical flooding mechanism. Since every node in a network selects its own MPRs independently, many nodes may be MPRs of other nodes, which results in many collisions in the medium access control (MAC) layer under heavy traffic conditions. In this paper, we propose an MPR candidate selection mechanism for broadcast data aggregation in mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed MPR candidate selection scheme can reduce the number of MPR candidates and appropriately spread MPR candidates over the whole network area. The performance of the proposed MPR candidate selection mechanism is investigated via mathematical analysis and simulations. We also propose a broadcast data aggregation mechanism to achive efficient resource utilization. Performance evaluation indicates that the proposed MPR candidate selection and broadcast data aggregation mechanism is efficient under heavy broadcast traffic load conditions.

Since the Content Distribution Network (CDN) and IP multicast have heavy infrastructure requirements, their deployment is quite restricted. In contrast, peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming applications are independent on infrastructures and thus have been widely deployed. Emerging wireless ad-hoc networks are poised to enable a variety of streaming applications. However, many potential problems, that are trivial in wired networks, will emerge when deploying existing P2P streaming applications directly into wireless ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a goodput optimization framework for P2P streaming over wireless ad-hoc networks. A two-level buffer architecture is proposed to reassign the naive streaming systems' data requests. The framework adopts a chunk size-varying transmission algorithm to obtain smooth playback experience and acceptable overhead and utilize limited bandwidth resources efficiently. The distinguishing features of our implementation are as follows: first, the framework works as a middleware and is independent on the streaming service properties; existing P2P streaming application can be deployed in wireless ad-hoc networks with minimum modifications and development cost; second, the proposed algorithm can reduce unnecessary communication overheads compared with traditional algorithms which gain high playback continuity with small chunk size; finally, our scheme can utilize low bandwidth transmission paths rather than discarding them, and thus improve overall performance of the wireless network. We also present a set of experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

As the demand for spectrum for future wireless communication services increases, cognitive radio technology has been developed for dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, which enables the secondary users to use the underutilized licensed spectrum of the primary users. In particular, the recent studies on the MAC protocol for dynamic and opportunistic access have focused on sensing and using the vacant spectrum efficiently. Under the ad-hoc network environment, how the secondary users use the unused channels by the primary users affects the efficient utilization of channels and a cognitive radio system is required to follow the rapid and frequent changes in channel status. In this paper, we propose a self-scheduling multi-channel cognitive MAC (SMC-MAC) protocol, which allows multiple secondary users to transmit data though the sensed idle channels by two cooperative channel sensing algorithms, i.e., fixed channel sensing (FCS) and adaptive channel sensing (ACS), and by slotted contention mechanism to exchange channel request information for self-scheduling. The performance of the proposed SMC-MAC protocol is investigated via analysis and simulations. According to the results, the proposed SMC-MAC protocol is effective in allowing multiple secondary users to transmit data frames effectively on multi-channels and adaptively in response to the primary users' traffic dynamics.

This paper proposes a new Ad-Hoc network system which comprises the multiple relay access points (APs) with multi channels. Ad-Hoc network systems are recently proposed and incorporated for the communication infrastructure, which relays wireless transmission among access points (APs) in wireless LAN (WLAN) system. System throughput is decreased due to hidden terminal problem when only a single channel is used for the Ad-Hoc network. In order to solve this problem, a new system with multi channels is proposed. However, even if the multi channels are employed, the co- and/or adjacent-channel interference occurs due to hidden terminal problem and multiple APs in a limited space, when considering a simultaneous transmit and reception at the relay AP. In this paper, we develop an Ad-Hoc network testbed which can reduce and avoid co- and/or adjacent-channel interference by using vertically arranged antenna configuration and distributed channel allocation scheme. Moreover, the effectiveness of our testbed is clarified by applying actual WLAN signals.

The safety applications for cooperative driving in VANETs, typically require the dissemination of safety-related information to all vehicles with high reliability and a strict timeline. However, due to the high vehicle mobility, dynamic traffic density, and a self-organized network, Safety message dissemination has a special challenge to efficiently use the limited network resources to satisfy its requirements. With this motivation, we propose a novel broadcasting protocol referred to as congestion awareness multi-hop broadcasting (CAMB) based loosely on a TDMA-like transmission scheduling scheme. The proposed protocol was evaluated using different traffic scenarios within both a realistic channel model and an 802.11p PHY/MAC model in our simulation. The simulation results showed that the performance of our CAMB protocol was better than those of the existing broadcasting protocols in terms of channel access delay, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and network overhead.

This paper proposes multipoint-to-multipoint (MPtoMP) real-time broadcast transmission using network coding for ad-hoc networks like video game networks. We aim to achieve highly reliable MPtoMP broadcasting using IEEE 802.11 media access control (MAC) that does not include a retransmission mechanism. When each node detects packets from the other nodes in a sequence, the correctly detected packets are network-encoded, and the encoded packet is broadcasted in the next sequence as a piggy-back for its native packet. To prevent increase of overhead in each packet due to piggy-back packet transmission, network coding vector for each node is exchanged between all nodes in the negotiation phase. Each user keeps using the same coding vector generated in the negotiation phase, and only coding information that represents which user signal is included in the network coding process is transmitted along with the piggy-back packet. Our simulation results show that the proposed method can provide higher reliability than other schemes using multi point relay (MPR) or redundant transmissions such as forward error correction (FEC). We also implement the proposed method in a wireless testbed, and show that the proposed method achieves high reliability in a real-world environment with a practical degree of complexity when installed on current wireless devices.

Based on game theory, a distributed power control algorithm with sequential subchannel nulling is proposed for ad-hoc networks. It is shown that the proposed method, by sharing subchannels appropriately according to the interference profiles, can reduce the power consumption of the network while satisfying the target rate of each link.

Due to the distributed nature, mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in distrusted communications. To achieve trusted communications, it is important to build trusted routes in routing algorithms in a self-organizing and decentralized fashion. This paper proposes a trusted routing to locate and to preserve trusted routes in MANETs. Instead of using a hard security mechanism, we employ a new dynamic trust mechanism based on multiple constraints and collaborative filtering. The dynamic trust mechanism can effectively evaluate the trust and obtain the precise trust value among nodes, and can also be integrated into existing routing protocols for MANETs, such as ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). As an example, we present a trusted routing protocol, based on dynamic trust mechanism, by extending DSR, in which a node makes a routing decision based on the trust values on its neighboring nodes, and finally, establish a trusted route through the trust values of the nodes along the route in MANETs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through extensive simulations.

Routing in wireless ad hoc networks is a challenging issue because it dynamically controls the network topology and determines the network performance. Most of the available protocols are based on single-rate radio networks and they use hop-count as the routing metric. There have been some efforts for multirate radios as well that use transmission-time of a packet as the routing metric. However, neither the hop-count nor the transmission-time may be a sufficient criterion for discovering a high-throughput path in a multirate wireless ad hoc network. Hop-count based routing metrics usually select a low-rate bound path whereas the transmission-time based metrics may select a path with a comparatively large number of hops. The trade-off between transmission time and effective transmission range of a data rate can be another key criterion for finding a high-throughput path in such environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel routing metric based on the efficiency of a data rate that balances the required time and covering distance by a transmission and results in increased throughput. Using the new metric, we propose an on-demand routing protocol for multirate wireless environment, dubbed MR-AODV, to discover high-throughput paths in the network. A key feature of MR-AODV is that it controls the data rate in transmitting both the data and control packets. Rate control during the route discovery phase minimizes the route request (RREQ) avalanche. We use simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed MR-AODV protocol and results reveal significant improvements in end-to-end throughput and minimization of routing overhead.

We propose a Multiple Zones-based (M-Zone) routing protocol to discover node-disjoint multiplath routing efficiently and effectively in large-scale MANETs. Compared with single path routing, multipath routing can improve robustness, load balancing and throughput of a network. However, it is very difficult to achieve node-disjoint multipath routing in large-scale MANETs. To ensure finding node-disjoint multiple paths, the M-Zone protocol divides the region between a source and a destination into multiple zones based on geographical location and each path is mapped to a distinct zone. Performance analysis shows that M-Zone has good stability, and the control complexity and storage complexity of M-Zone are lower than those of the well-known AODVM protocol. Simulation studies show that the average end-to-end delay of M-Zone is lower than that of AODVM and the routing overhead of M-Zone is less than that of AODVM.

In this paper, we study an opportunistic scheduling and adaptive modulation scheme for a wireless network with an XOR network coding scheme, which results in a cross-layer problem for MAC and physical layers. A similar problem was studied in [2] which considered an idealized system with the Shannon capacity. They showed that it may not be optimal for a relay node to encode all possible native packets and there exists the optimal subset of native packets that depends on the channel condition at the receiver node of each native packet. In this paper, we consider a more realistic model than that of [2] with a practical modulation scheme such as M-PSK. We show that the optimal policy is to encode native as many native packets as possible in the network coding group into a coded packet regardless of the channel condition at the receiver node for each native packet, which is a different conclusion from that of [2]. However, we show that adaptive modulation, in which the constellation size of a coded packet is adjusted based on the channel condition of each receiver node, provides a higher throughput than fixed modulation, in which its constellation size is always fixed regardless of the channel condition at each receiver node.

The usable throughput of an IEEE 802.11 system for an application is much less than the raw bandwidth. Although 802.11b has a theoretical maximum of 11 Mbps, more than half of the bandwidth is consumed by overhead leaving at most 5 Mbps of usable bandwidth. Considering this characteristic, this paper proposes and analyzes a real-time distributed scheduling scheme based on the existing IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks, using USC/ISI's Power Aware Sensing Tracking and Analysis (PASTA) hardware platform. We compared the distributed real-time scheduling scheme with the real-time polling scheme to meet deadline, and compared a measured real bandwidth with a theoretical result. The theoretical and experimental results show that the distributed scheduling scheme can guarantee real-time traffic and enhances the performance up to 74% compared with polling scheme.