In this study, we consider fake message attacks in sparse mobile ad hoc networks, in which nodes are chronically isolated. In these networks, messages are delivered to their destination nodes using store-carry-forward routing, where they are relayed by some nodes. Therefore, when a node has messages in its buffer, it can falsify the messages easily. When malicious nodes exist in the network, they alter messages to create fake messages, and then they launch fake message attacks, that is, the fake messages are spread over the network. To analyze the negative effects of a fake message attack, we model the system dynamics without attack countermeasures using a Markov chain, and then formalize some performance metrics (i.e., the delivery probability, mean delivery delay, and mean number of forwarded messages). This analysis is useful for designing countermeasures. Moreover, we consider a hash-based countermeasure against fake message attacks using a hash of the message. Whenever a node that has a message and its hash encounters another node, it probabilistically forwards only one of them to the encountered node. By doing this, the message and the hash value can be delivered to the destination node via different relay nodes. Therefore, even if the destination node receives a fake message, it can verify the legitimacy of the received message. Through simulation experiments, we evaluate the effectiveness of the hash-based countermeasure.

To minimize the damage caused by landslides resulting from torrential rain, residents must quickly evacuate to a place of refuge. To make the decision to evacuate, residents must be able to collect and share disaster information. Firstly, this paper introduces the Grass-roots Information Distribution System and a fixed type monitoring system which our research group has been developing. The fixed type monitoring system is deployed at the location of apparent danger, whereas the Grass-roots Information Distribution System distributes disaster information acquired from the fixed type monitoring system through a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to residents. The MANET is configured using mobile terminals of residents. Next, in this paper, an information dissemination scheme utilizing a MANET and cellular networks to communicate among mobile terminals is proposed and simulated in the area where our research group has been deploying the distribution system. The MANET topology and information distribution obtained from the simulation results for further field experiments are then discussed.

We propose a home base-aware store-carry-forward routing scheme using location-dependent utilities of nodes, which adopts different message forwarding strategies depending on location where nodes encounter. Our routing scheme first attempts to deliver messages to its home base, the area with the highest potential for the presence of the destination node in the near future. Once a message copy reaches its home base, message dissemination is limited within the home base, and nodes with message copies wait for encountering the destination node. To realize our routing scheme, we use two different utilities of nodes depending on location: Outside the home base of a message, nodes approaching to the home base have high utility values, while within the home base, nodes staying the home base have high utility values. By using these utilities properly, nodes with message copies will catch the destination node “by ambush” in the home base of the destination node. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our routing scheme.

Established in self-organized mode between mobile terminals (MT), mobile Ad Hoc networks are characterized by a fast change of network topology, limited power dissipation of network node, limited network bandwidth and poor security of the network. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient one round certificateless authenticated group key agreement (OR-CLAGKA) protocol to satisfy the security demand of mobile Ad Hoc networks. Based on elliptic curve public key cryptography (ECC), OR-CLAGKA protocol utilizes the assumption of elliptic curve discrete logarithm problems (ECDLP) to guarantee its security. In contrast with those certificateless authenticated group key agreement (GKA) protocols, OR-CLAGKA protocol can reduce protocol data interaction between group users and it is based on efficient ECC public key infrastructure without calculating bilinear pairings, which involves negligible computational overhead. Thus, it is particularly suitable to deploy OR-CLAGKA protocol on MT devices because of its limited computation capacity and power consumption. Also, under the premise of keeping the forward and backward security, OR-CLAGKA protocol has achieved appropriate optimization to improve the performance of Ad Hoc networks in terms of frequent communication interrupt and reconnection. In addition, it has reduced executive overheads of key agreement protocol to make the protocol more suitable for mobile Ad Hoc network applications.

Throughput capacity is of great importance for the design and performance optimization of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We study the exact per node throughput capacity of MANETs under a general 2HR-(g, x, f) routing scheme which combines erasure coding and packet replication techniques. Under this scheme, a source node first encodes a group of g packets into x (x ≥ g) distinct coded packets, and then replicates each of the coded packets to at most f relay nodes which help to forward them to the destination node. All original packets can be recovered once the destination node receives any g distinct coded packets of the group. To study the throughput capacity, we first construct two absorbing Markov chain models to depict the complicated packet delivery process under the routing scheme. Based on these Markov models, an analytical expression of the throughput capacity is derived. Extensive simulation and numerical results are provided to verify the accuracy of theoretical results on throughput capacity and to illustrate how system parameters will affect the throughput capacity in MANETs. Interestingly, we find that the replication of coded packets can improve the throughput capacity when the parameter x is relatively small.

In mobile ad hoc networks, a malicious node can respond with a faked route reply (RREP) message to a source that explores a route in order to make the source establish a false route leading to the malicious node. Then, the malicious node can absorb all transmitted packets like a black hole. This paper proposes a totally secure defense against the black hole attack with low control overhead and high reliability. The proposed approach, named a bullet-proof verification (BPV) method, consists of a detection phase, in which a node detects a suspicious node by analyzing the data routing information of its neighbors and a verification phase, in which a node initiates the verification of a suspicious node conditionally only if it receives RREP from the suspicious node. The crux of this approach lies in using an encrypted verification message that goes straight to the destination through the path that may include some malicious nodes and also in using both destination sequence number and hop distance for verification. In addition, a distributed watchdog mechanism is employed to track down any malicious nodes. Simulation results show that the BPV approach reduces control overhead significantly and defends against black hole attack reliably.

We consider a location-aware store-carry-forward routing scheme based on node density estimation (LA Routing in short), which adopts different message forwarding strategies depending on node density at contact locations where two nodes encounter. To do so, each node estimates a node density distribution based on information about contact locations. In this paper, we clarify how the estimation accuracy affects the performance of LA Routing. We also examine the performance of LA Routing when it applies to networks with homogeneous node density. Through simulation experiments, we show that LA Routing is fairly robust against the accuracy of node density estimation and its performance is comparable with Probabilistic Routing even in the case that that node density is homogeneous.

This paper proposes T-CROM (Time-delayed Collaborative ROuting and MAC) protocol, that allows collaboration between network and MAC layers in order to extend the lifetime of MANETs in a resources-limited environment. T-CROM increases the probability of preventing energy-poor nodes from joining routes by using a time delay function that is inversely proportional to the residual battery capacity of intermediate nodes, making a delay in the route request (RREQ) packets transmission. The route along which the first-arrived RREQ packet traveled has the smallest time delay, and thus the destination node identifies the route with the maximum residual battery capacity. This protocol leads to a high probability of avoiding energy-poor nodes and promotes energy-rich nodes to join routes in the route establishment phase. In addition, T-CROM controls the congestion between neighbors and reduces the energy dissipation by providing an energy-efficient backoff time by considering both the residual battery capacity of the host itself and the total number of neighbor nodes. The energy-rich node with few neighbors has a short backoff time, and the energy-poor node with many neighbors gets assigned a large backoff time. Thus, T-CROM controls the channel access priority of each node in order to prohibit the energy-poor nodes from contending with the energy-rich nodes. T-CROM fairly distributes the energy consumption of each node, and thus extends the network lifetime collaboratively. Simulation results show that T-CROM reduces the number of total collisions, extends the network lifetime, decreases the energy consumption, and increases the packet delivery ratio, compared with AOMDV with IEEE 802.11 DCF and BLAM, a battery-aware energy efficient MAC protocol.

The capacity of general mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) remains largely unknown up to now, which significantly hinders the development and commercialization of such networks. Available throughput capacity studies of MANETs mainly focus on either the order sense capacity scaling laws, the exact throughput capacity under a specific algorithm, or the exact throughput capacity without a careful consideration of critical wireless interference and transmission range issues. In this paper, we explore the exact throughput capacity for a class of MANETs, where we adopt group-based scheduling to schedule simultaneous link transmissions for interference avoidance and allow the transmission range of each node to be adjusted. We first determine a general throughput capacity upper bound for the concerned MANETs, which holds for any feasible packet delivery algorithm in such networks. We then prove that the upper bound we determined is just the exact throughput capacity for this class of MANETs by showing that for any traffic input rate within the throughput capacity upper bound, there exists a corresponding two-hop relay algorithm to stabilize such networks. A closed-form upper bound for packet delay is further derived under any traffic input rate within the throughput capacity. Finally, based on the network capacity result, we examine the impacts of transmission range and node density upon network capacity.

Existing MANET routing protocols may not be efficient for mobile sensor networks (MSNs) since they generate too much control traffic by relying on flooding or route maintenance messages. Furthermore, peer-to-peer communication patterns assumed in MANET would exacerbate the traffic around sink nodes in MSNs. In this paper we propose traffic adaptive routing (TAR) for MSNs; it can reduce the control packets by analyzing and predicting the source, volume, and the patterns of both traffic and mobility. Through its analysis and the prediction of mobility, TAR also copes with dynamic topology changes by carrying out a fast route recovery process. Our theoretical analysis shows that TAR can effectively reduce unnecessary control packet flooding by 53% on average when compared to AODV. We implement TAR on NS-2. Our experimental evaluation confirms that TAR can not only improve the network and energy performance for MSNs but also can be a practical routing solution for MANET and WSNs compared to the existing ad hoc routing protocols.

The future wireless mobile communication networks are expected to provide seamless wireless access and data exchange to mobile users. In particular, it is expected that the demand for ubiquitous data exchange between mobile users will increase with the widespread use of various wireless applications of the intelligent transportation system (ITS) and intelligent vehicles. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are one of the representative research areas pursuing the technology needed to satisfy the increasing mobile communication requirements. However, most of the works on MANET systems do not take into account the continuous and dynamic changes of nodal mobility to accommodate system design and performance evaluation. The mobility of nodes limits the reliability of communication between the source and the destination node since a link between two continuously moving nodes is established only when one node enters the transmission range of the other. To alleviate this problem, mobile relay has been studied. In particular, it is shown that relay selection is an efficient way to support nodal mobility in MANET systems. In this paper, we propose a mobility-based relay selection algorithm for the MANET environment. Firstly, we define the lifetime as the maximum link duration for which the link between two nodes remains active. Therefore, the lifetime indicates the reliability of the relay link which measures its capability to successfully support relayed communication when requested by the source node. Furthermore, we consider a series of realistic scenarios according to the randomness of nodal mobility. Thus, the proposed algorithm can be easily applied in practical MANET systems by choosing the appropriate node mobility behavior. The numerical results show that the improved reliability of the proposed algorithm's relayed communication is achieved with a proper number of mobile relay nodes rather than with the conventional selection algorithm. Lastly, we show that random mobility of the individual nodes enhances reliability of the network in a sparse network environment.

Epidemic Routing is a data delivery scheme based on the store-carry-forward routing paradigm for sparsely populated mobile ad hoc networks. In Epidemic Routing, each node copies packets in its buffer into any other node that comes within its communication range. Although Epidemic Routing has short delay performance, it causes excessive buffer space utilization at nodes because many packet copies are disseminated over the network. In this paper, aiming at efficient buffer usage, we propose an XOR-based delivery scheme for Epidemic Routing, where nodes encode packets by XORing them when their buffers are full. Note that existing delivery schemes with coding are active coding, where source nodes always encode packets before transmitting them. On the other hand, the proposed scheme is passive coding, where source nodes encode packets only when buffer overflow would occur. Therefore, the behavior of the proposed scheme depends on the buffer utilization. More specifically, if sufficient buffer space is available, the proposed scheme delivers packets by the same operation as Epidemic Routing. Otherwise, it avoids buffer overflow by encoding packets. Simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme improves the packet delivery ratio.

A novel routing protocol, named candidate-based routing, for mobile ad hoc networks is presented. Instead of flooding over the whole network, it improves and rebuilds routing paths among a limited number of candidate nodes, which are dynamically elected without incurring or exchanging any additional information. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol performs well in terms of overhead and improvement in route efficiency, especially in the high mobility speed environments.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) have inherently dynamic topologies. Due to the distributed, multi-hop nature of these networks, random mobility of nodes not only affects the availability of radio links between particular node pairs, but also threatens the reliability of communication paths, service discovery, even quality of service of MANETs. In this paper, a novel Markov chain model is presented to predict link availability for MANETs. Based on a rough estimation of the initial distance between two nodes, the proposed approach is able to accurately estimate link availability in a random mobility environment. Furthermore, the proposed link availability estimation approach is integrated into Max-Min d-clustering heuristic. The enhanced clustering heuristic, called M4C, takes node mobility into account when it groups mobile nodes into clusters. Simulation results are given to verify the approach and the performance improvement of clustering algorithm. It also demonstrates the adaptability of M4C, and shows that M4C is able to achieve a tradeoff between the effectiveness of topology aggregation and cluster stabilities. The proposed algorithm can also be used to improve the availability and quality of services for MANETs.

This letter proposes a busy-tone based scheme for reliable and efficient broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks. Control packets such as RTS, CTS and ACK are ignored in the broadcast scheme, and two busy tones are used, one for channel reservation and the other for negative acknowledgement. Unlike traditional schemes for reliable broadcasting, the proposed scheme is highly efficient as it achieves both collision avoidance and fast packet loss recovery. Simulation results are presented which show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Routing algorithms with low overhead, stable link and independence of the total number of nodes in the network are essential for the design and operation of the large-scale wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). In this paper, we develop and analyze the Cluster Based Location-Aided Routing Protocol for MANET (C-LAR), a scalable and effective routing algorithm for MANET. C-LAR runs on top of an adaptive cluster cover of the MANET, which can be created and maintained using, for instance, the weight-based distributed algorithm. This algorithm takes into consideration the node degree, mobility, relative distance, battery power and link stability of mobile nodes. The hierarchical structure stabilizes the end-to-end communication paths and improves the networks' scalability such that the routing overhead does not become tremendous in large scale MANET. The clusterheads form a connected virtual backbone in the network, determine the network's topology and stability, and provide an efficient approach to minimizing the flooding traffic during route discovery and speeding up this process as well. Furthermore, it is fascinating and important to investigate how to control the total number of nodes participating in a routing establishment process so as to improve the network layer performance of MANET. C-LAR is to use geographical location information provided by Global Position System to assist routing. The location information of destination node is used to predict a smaller rectangle, isosceles triangle, or circle request zone, which is selected according to the relative location of the source and the destination, that covers the estimated region in which the destination may be located. Thus, instead of searching the route in the entire network blindly, C-LAR confines the route searching space into a much smaller estimated range. Simulation results have shown that C-LAR outperforms other protocols significantly in route set up time, routing overhead, mean delay and packet collision, and simultaneously maintains low average end-to-end delay, high success delivery ratio, low control overhead, as well as low route discovery frequency.

Simulations are often deployed to evaluate proposed mechanisms or algorithms in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). In MANET, the impacts of some simulation parameters are noticeable, such as transmission range, data rate etc. However, the effect of mobility model is not clear until recently. Random Waypoint (RWP) is one of the most applied nodal mobility models in many simulations due to its clear procedures and easy employments. However, it exhibits the two major problems: decaying average speed and border effect. Both problems will overestimate the performance of the employed protocols and applications. Although many recently proposed mobility models are able to reduce or eliminate the above-mentioned problems, the concept of Diverse Average Speed (DAS) has not been introduced. DAS aims to provide different average speeds within the same speed range. In most mobility models, the average speed is decided when the minimum and maximum speeds are set. In this paper, we propose a novel mobility model, named General Ripple Mobility Model (GRMM). GRMM targets to provide a uniform nodal spatial distribution and DAS without decaying average speed. The simulations and analytic results have demonstrated the merits of the outstanding properties of the GRMM model.

In case of link failures, many ad hoc routing protocols recover a route by employing source-initiated route re-discovery, but this approach can degrade system performance. Some use localized route recovery, which may yield non-optimal paths. Our proposal provides a mechanism that can enhance the overall routing performance by initiating route recovery at the destination node. We elucidate the effects through simulations including comparisons with AODV and AODV with local repair.

Video multicast over wireless medium has gained increasing popularity in a wide range of applications, such as video-on-demand and group video conferencing. With mobile ad hoc networks emerging as a promising solution for future ubiquitous communications, supporting reliable video multicast over mobile ad hoc networks is a timely research topic. In this paper we tackle this issue by using multiple tree multicast routing protocol. Specifically, we introduce an extension to the Multicast Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocol to construct two optimally disjoint trees in a single routine. The extended protocol is called Multiple Tree Multicast Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (MT-MAODV) routing protocol. In order to distribute the video evenly and independently between these disjoint trees, the Multiple Description Coding (MDC) scheme is used for video coding. Simulation shows that the proposed protocol demonstrates video multicast with better quality than the conventional video multicast using a single tree only.

A mobile ad hoc network is an autonomous wireless network which consists of mobile nodes without any base stations. Many routing schemes and services have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. However, since these schemes tend to be evaluated through simulation experiments, it is not known whether they work effectively in real environments or not. Therefore, in order to verify their practical use in mobile ad hoc networks, it is necessary to perform field experiments using actual mobile nodes. If the network size is large, it is difficult to perform field experiments due to problems with limited battery, difficulty of topology control and so on. Realization of rapid topology change of the ad hoc networks topology is especially difficult. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a testing environment for mobile ad hoc network software, which emulates field experiments in wired networks.