Guest editorial

Citation

Agarwal, D.A., Tran, D.A. and Yarvis, M.D. (2009), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 5 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpcc.2009.36105daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Volume 5, Issue 4

The next generation of communication networks will need to support rapid, dynamic deployments of independent mobile users. Mobile users should be able to connect to each other directly and wirelessly without centralized network infrastructure. They form mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). These networks are self-configured and self-healing, and therefore easily adopted in a home environment and cheaply deployed and maintained in a business environment. MANETs are gaining in popularity and usage. Group communication technologies have already shown their importance in education, entertainment, business, military, and other industries. However, the group communication technologies have mainly been designed for use in the internet. This issue focuses on group communication solutions for mobile ad hoc networks.

Research on group communications in ad hoc networks is still in its infancy. There are many open issues due to the gap between availability of resources such as energy and bandwidth in ad hoc networks and the quality of service required by group communication services. We have selected for this special issue seven research papers which fall into the following areas: multicast routing, broadcasting, security, resilience, and performance and design-tradeoff evaluations.

Multicast routing in MANETs typically follows the same multicast group model as in the Internet, where the routers collectively maintain multicast session state information for the network. Maintenance of this information may be costly due to frequent topology and group membership changes. The first paper, titled “Effective location-guided overlay multicast in mobile ad hoc networks”, by Chen and Nahrstedt presents a stateless multicast scheme based on packet encapsulation. Multicast packets are forwarded among the group nodes via unicast routing in an overlay fashion. The authors propose several novel overlay tree construction algorithms to minimize the overall bandwidth cost. These algorithms rely on the geometric locations of the group nodes as heuristics to compute the tree. The simulation results confirm that using location-guided heuristics is effective in constructing low-cost overlay multicast trees in a MANET.

Broadcasting is a primary operation in MANETs, regardless of the routing protocol employed. To reduce redundancy in forwarding packets, Bae and Yoon propose a novel reactive broadcast pruning scheme (ABP) in their paper “Autonomous broadcast pruning in wireless ad hoc networking using coverage estimation.” By estimating the remaining coverage based on the position information of previously broadcast neighbors, receiving nodes can determine the validity of their broadcast. As this decision is made in the ongoing broadcasting process, ABP reduces unnecessary broadcasts significantly.

The next paper, “WShare: an instant secure collaboration workspace over ad hoc wireless LAN”, by Raniwala et al. describes a system called WShare that can set up a comprehensive collaboration infrastructure for a face-to-face meeting session without any infrastructural support. WShare in essence provides a middleware layer for ad hoc networks that supports secure transport, reliable multicast, replicated directory, cooperative file sharing, and application sharing. Although many of the individual mechanisms in WShare are well known, the way they are integrated in WShare to form a unique end-to-end collaborative application is novel. The paper describes the WShare prototype implementation.

A distributed security architecture is introduced in the paper “Design and evaluation of a security architecture for ad hoc networks” by Kraft et al. A distributed certification authority is preferred because centralized public key infrastructures are not practical in MANETs. The authors propose to cluster the network, with head nodes performing administrative functions and holding shares of a network key used for certification. New nodes start to participate as guests and can only become full members with a network-signed certificate after their authenticity has been warranted by existing members. Access to resources and services within the network are controlled using authorization certificates. The authors used simulation to verify the feasibility of the proposed concept.

Failure detection is an important component in many reliable distributed services and applications. In the paper titled “Evaluating failure detection in mobile ad hoc networks”, Friedman and Tcharny adapted a gossip-based failure detection protocol to MANETs. The evaluation results can be viewed as a feasibility check for implementing failure detection. This work allows other services to be build on top of a failure detection component and has implications on the way they should rely on failure detection in MANETs.

Many MANET applications require real-time data consistency among moving nodes within a geographical area of interest to function correctly, e.g. those that support disaster recovery and battlefield command and control. In the paper “Performance characteristics of location-based group membership and data consistency algorithms in mobile ad hoc networks”, Wilson and Chen use a Petri net performance model to analyze the performance of location-based algorithms when used to maintain data consistency. Consequently, they can identify design conditions under which the system can trade off consistency for timeliness while satisfying the imposed data consistency requirement.

To enable group communication in MANETs, it is useful to study the impact of the average node degree in the network on network connectivity, network diameter, and energy consumed by packet transmission. This study is presented in the last paper of the issue, “The effects of the number of neighbors in multihop wireless networks” by Zhang and Maxemchuk.

It is our expectation that technologies for group communication in ad hoc networks will have a significant impact on how people communicate in the future. Research in this area is therefore important, and we hope you enjoy the papers in this special issue. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our reviewers for their time and diligence during the review process. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors for their quality work.

Best regards,

Deborah A. Agarwal, Duc A. Tran, Mark D. YarvisGuest Editors

About the Guest Editors

Deborah A. Agarwal is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Her research includes secure and reliable group communication protocols, data analysis support infrastructure for eco-science, and cybersecurity. She is also interested in cloud, grid, and P2P networks. She is the head of the Advanced Computing for Science Department at LBNL. Deborah earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering (1985) from Purdue University. Her MS and PhD (1994) are from University of California, Santa Barbara in Computer Engineering.

 

Duc A. Tran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he leads the Network Information Systems Laboratory (NISLab). He received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida (Orlando, Florida) in 2003. Dr Tran’s interests are in the areas of networking and distributed systems. The results of his work have led to two Best Papers (ICCCN 2008, DaWak 1999). Dr Tran has served as a Review Panelist for the NSF, Guest-Editor for IJPEDS, TPC Chair for IRSN 2009 and GridPeer 2009, TPC Vice-Chair for AINA 2007, and TPC member for 30+ international conferences.

 

Mark D. Yarvis received BS (1991), MS (1998), and PhD (2001) degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2001, he has been a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs. He has served on the editorial board of Ad Hoc Networks Journal and as TPC chair of SECON 2006 and BodyNets 2009. His research interests include mobile and wireless systems, sensor networks, pervasive and personalized computing, and adaptive software systems. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.