arXiv subjects

Marcelo Dias de Amorim

Publications and source records attributed to Marcelo Dias de Amorim.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2018

Mobility as an Alternative Communication Channel: A Survey

We review the research literature investigating systems in which mobile entities can carry data while they move. These entities can be either mobile by nature (e.g., human beings and animals) or mobile by design (e.g., trains, airplanes, and cars). The movements of such entities equipped with storage capabilities create a communication channel which can help overcome the limitations or the lack of conventional data networks. Common limitations include the mismatch between the capacity offered by these networks and the traffic demand or their limited deployment owing to environmental factors. Application scenarios include offloading traffic off legacy networks for capacity improvement, bridging connectivity gaps, or deploying ad hoc networks in challenging environments for coverage enhancement.

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arXiv2012

Temporal Reachability Graphs

While a natural fit for modeling and understanding mobile networks, time-varying graphs remain poorly understood. Indeed, many of the usual concepts of static graphs have no obvious counterpart in time-varying ones. In this paper, we introduce the notion of temporal reachability graphs. A (tau,delta)-reachability graph} is a time-varying directed graph derived from an existing connectivity graph. An edge exists from one node to another in the reachability graph at time t if there exists a journey (i.e., a spatiotemporal path) in the connectivity graph from the first node to the second, leaving after t, with a positive edge traversal time tau, and arriving within a maximum delay delta. We make three contributions. First, we develop the theoretical framework around temporal reachability graphs. Second, we harness our theoretical findings to propose an algorithm for their efficient computation. Finally, we demonstrate the analytic power of the temporal reachability graph concept by applying it to synthetic and real-life datasets. On top of defining clear upper bounds on communication capabilities, reachability graphs highlight asymmetric communication opportunities and offloading potential.

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arXiv2012

Push-and-Track: Saving Infrastructure Bandwidth Through Opportunistic Forwarding

Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemina- tion framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be reinjected into the network through the 3G interface. Push-and-Track is flexible and can be applied to a variety of scenarios, including periodic message flooding and floating data. For the former, this paper examines multiple strategies to determine how many copies of the content should be injected, when, and to whom; for the latter, it examines the achievable offload ratio depending on the freshness constraints. The short delay-tolerance of common content, such as news or road traffic updates, make them suitable for such a system. Use cases with a long delay-tolerance, such as software updates, are an even better fit. Based on a realistic large-scale vehicular dataset from the city of Bologna composed of more than 10,000 vehicles, we demonstrate that Push-and-Track consistently meets its delivery objectives while reducing the use of the 3G network by about 90%.

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arXiv2011

Using Neighborhood Beyond One Hop in Disruption-Tolerant Networks

Most disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) protocols available in the literature have focused on mere contact and intercontact characteristics to make forwarding decisions. Nevertheless, there is a world behind contacts: just because one node is not in contact with some potential destination, it does not mean that this node is alone. There may be interesting end-to-end transmission opportunities through other nearby nodes. Existing protocols miss such possibilities by maintaining a simple contact-based view of the network. In this paper, we investigate how the vicinity of a node evolves through time and whether such information can be useful when routing data. We observe a clear tradeoff between routing performance and the cost for monitoring the neighborhood. Our analyses suggest that limiting a node's neighborhood view to three or four hops is more than enough to significantly improve forwarding efficiency without incurring prohibitive overhead.

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arXiv2011

Relieving the Wireless Infrastructure: When Opportunistic Networks Meet Guaranteed Delays

Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemination framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be reinjected into the network through the 3G interface. Push-and-Track includes multiple strategies to determine how many copies of the content should be injected, when, and to whom. The short delay-tolerance of common content, such as news or road traffic updates, make them suitable for such a system. Based on a realistic large-scale vehicular dataset from the city of Bologna composed of more than 10,000 vehicles, we demonstrate that Push-and-Track consistently meets its delivery objectives while reducing the use of the 3G network by over 90%.

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arXiv2010

Performance of Opportunistic Epidemic Routing on Edge-Markovian Dynamic Graphs

Connectivity patterns in intermittently-connected mobile networks (ICMN) can be modeled as edge-Markovian dynamic graphs. We propose a new model for epidemic propagation on such graphs and calculate a closed-form expression that links the best achievable delivery ratio to common ICMN parameters such as message size, maximum tolerated delay, and link lifetime. These theoretical results are compared to those obtained by replaying a real-life contact trace.

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arXiv2010

From Encounters to Plausible Mobility

Inferring plausible node mobility based only on information from wireless contact traces is a difficult problem. Working with mobility information allows richer protocol simulations, particularly in dense networks, but requires complex set-ups to measure. On the other hand, contact information is easier to measure but only allows for simplistic simulation models. In a contact trace a lot of node movement information is irretrievably lost so the original positions and velocities are in general out of reach. In this paper, we propose a fast heuristic algorithm, inspired by dynamic force-based graph drawing, capable of inferring a plausible movement from any contact trace, and evaluate it on both synthetic and real-life contact traces. Our results reveal that (i) the quality of the inferred mobility is directly linked to the precision of the measured contact trace, and (ii) the simple addition of appropriate anticipation forces between nodes leads to an accurate inferred mobility.

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arXiv2010

Tuning Message Size in Opportunistic Mobile Networks

We describe a new model for studying intermittently connected mobile networks, based on Markovian random temporal graphs, that captures the influence of message size, maximum tolerated delay and link stability on the delivery ratio.

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arXiv2010

Dimensionnement des messages dans un reseau mobile opportuniste

Understanding transport capacity in intermittently connected mobile networks (ICMN) is crucial since different applications have different interactivity and bandwidth requirements. One practical issue is how to transform an application's messages into packets suitable for transport over an ICMN. In this paper, we propose a new Markovian model for random temporal graphs and show, both analytically and by replaying a real life trace obtained in a rollerblading tour, that the size of the messages sent over an ICMN has a decisive impact on their delivery ratio. A given message could therefore be broken down into smaller packets to increase reliability. However, we also show that this gain in reliability only appears under tight constraints on the maximum delay tolerated. Mobile application designers should therefore balance message size against both application requirements and network topology dynamics to improve performance.

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arXiv2010

Plausible Mobility: Inferring Movement from Contacts

We address the difficult question of inferring plausible node mobility based only on information from wireless contact traces. Working with mobility information allows richer protocol simulations, particularly in dense networks, but requires complex set-ups to measure, whereas contact information is easier to measure but only allows for simplistic simulation models. In a contact trace a lot of node movement information is irretrievably lost so the original positions and velocities are in general out of reach. We propose a fast heuristic algorithm, inspired by dynamic force-based graph drawing, capable of inferring a plausible movement from any contact trace, and evaluate it on both synthetic and real-life contact traces. Our results reveal that (i) the quality of the inferred mobility is directly linked to the precision of the measured contact trace, and (ii) the simple addition of appropriate anticipation forces between nodes leads to an accurate inferred mobility.

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arXiv2008

WiPal: Efficient Offline Merging of IEEE 802.11 Traces

Merging wireless traces is a fundamental step in measurement-based studies involving multiple packet sniffers. Existing merging tools either require a wired infrastructure or are limited in their usability. We propose WiPal, an offline merging tool for IEEE 802.11 traces that has been designed to be efficient and simple to use. WiPal is flexible in the sense that it does not require any specific services, neither from monitors (like synchronization, access to a wired network, or embedding specific software) nor from its software environment (e.g. an SQL server). We present WiPal's operation and show how its features - notably, its modular design - improve both ease of use and efficiency. Experiments on real traces show that WiPal is an order of magnitude faster than other tools providing the same features. To our knowledge, WiPal is the only offline trace merger that can be used by the research community in a straightforward fashion.

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arXiv2007

Rapid Prototyping over IEEE 802.11

This paper introduces Prawn, a tool for prototyping communication protocols over IEEE 802.11 networks. Prawn allows researchers to conduct both functional assessment and performance evaluation as an inherent part of the protocol design process. Since Prawn runs on real IEEE 802.11 nodes, prototypes can be evaluated and adjusted under realistic conditions. Once the prototype has been extensively tested and thoroughly validated, and its functional design tuned accordingly, it is then ready for implementation. Prawn facilitates prototype development by providing: (i) a set of building blocks that implement common functions needed by a wide range of wireless protocols (e.g., neighbor discovery, link quality assessment, message transmission and reception), and (ii) an API that allows protocol designers to access Prawn primitives. We show through a number of case studies how Prawn supports prototyping as part of protocol design and, as a result of enabling deployment and testing under real-world scenarios, how Prawn provides useful feedback on protocol operation and performance.

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arXiv2006

SIMPS: Using Sociology for Personal Mobility

Assessing mobility in a thorough fashion is a crucial step toward more efficient mobile network design. Recent research on mobility has focused on two main points: analyzing models and studying their impact on data transport. These works investigate the consequences of mobility. In this paper, instead, we focus on the causes of mobility. Starting from established research in sociology, we propose SIMPS, a mobility model of human crowd motion. This model defines two complimentary behaviors, namely socialize and isolate, that regulate an individual with regard to her/his own sociability level. SIMPS leads to results that agree with scaling laws observed both in small-scale and large-scale human motion. Although our model defines only two simple individual behaviors, we observe many emerging collective behaviors (group formation/splitting, path formation, and evolution). To our knowledge, SIMPS is the first model in the networking community that tackles the roots governing mobility.

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arXiv2006

Share and Disperse: How to Resist Against Aggregator Compromises in Sensor Networks

A common approach to overcome the limited nature of sensor networks is to aggregate data at intermediate nodes. A challenging issue in this context is to guarantee end-to-end security mainly because sensor networks are extremely vulnerable to node compromises. In order to secure data aggregation, in this paper we propose three schemes that rely on multipath routing. The first one guarantees data confidentiality through secret sharing, while the second and third ones provide data availability through information dispersal. Based on qualitative analysis and implementation, we show that, by applying these schemes, a sensor network can achieve data confidentiality, authenticity, and protection against denial of service attacks even in the presence of multiple compromised nodes.

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arXiv2006

Jumps: Enhancing hop-count positioning in sensor networks using multiple coordinates

Positioning systems in self-organizing networks generally rely on measurements such as delay and received signal strength, which may be difficult to obtain and often require dedicated equipment. An alternative to such approaches is to use simple connectivity information, that is, the presence or absence of a link between any pair of nodes, and to extend it to hop-counts, in order to obtain an approximate coordinate system. Such an approximation is sufficient for a large number of applications, such as routing. In this paper, we propose Jumps, a positioning system for those self-organizing networks in which other types of (exact) positioning systems cannot be used or are deemed to be too costly. Jumps builds a multiple coordinate system based solely on nodes neighborhood knowledge. Jumps is interesting in the context of wireless sensor networks, as it neither requires additional embedded equipment nor relies on any nodes capabilities. While other approaches use only three hop-count measurements to infer the position of a node, Jumps uses an arbitrary number. We observe that an increase in the number of measurements leads to an improvement in the localization process, without requiring a high dense environment. We show through simulations that Jumps, when compared with existing approaches, reduces the number of nodes sharing the same coordinates, which paves the way for functions such as position-based routing.

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