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Intelligent Design of Metropolitan Ad hoc Networks (MANETs)

The use of mobile devices is more and more generalized in our society. Examples of this are mobile phones, PDAs, GPS systems or laptops. This causes an increasing interest in research on spontaneous networks, established in these environments without any preexisting infrastructure, that enable end-to-end communication among these mobile devices. These networks are called metropolitan ad hoc networks or MANETs (see figure). The interest on MANET networks is mainly motivated by their diversity and the usefulness of the applications supported by them, such as advertisement broadcast and/or warnings in usually crowded areas (malls, train stations or airports), or videogame and data sharing applications among several users.

manets

The design of this kind of network is highly complex due to their spontaneous and dynamic behaviour, since they are automatically stablished without any infrastructure and the devices forming it can roam freely as well as appear/disappear from the network at any time. The existence of networks of this kind is based on the use of broadcasting algorithms that allow to know the network topology in every moment. The problem's difficulty is aggravated by the low resources available to the devices forming the network (both autonomy and computing power), which causes resource utilization to be one of the main minimization objectives for the algorithms. A good broadcasting algorithm should maximize the number of devices reached and minimize the use of the network and the processing time. Therefore, we propose the optimization of a broadcasting protocol (named DFCN) according to these criteria. For this we will use a network simulator (Madhoc) that will emulate the behaviour of the broadcasting protocol in several scenarios inspired from the real world: a mall, an urban scenario and a road network.

In addition, we foresee the possible use of these optimization techniques in networks containing dynamic UMTS bridges, which are interconnections between different networks and whose use must be minimized due to their high cost.

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