Wireless ad hoc networks use mobile devices to deliver services supported by high-speed network connections and high-speed data transmissions in real time. These devices (network nodes) typically act as the network infrastructure to forward data to other nodes from a source to the destination. However, several constraints (e.g., processor, energy consumption, and bandwidth) affect the overall network performance. Cooperation strategies have been considered as a solution to such network limitations and constraints. Recent studies have presented cooperation mechanisms as a solution to unstable network infrastructures where mobile nodes cooperate with each other, forwarding data and performing all the networking functionalities. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art on cooperation strategies and algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks and delay-tolerant networks. These challenged networks frequently comprise situations where traditional Internet protocols fail to effectively provide desired or expected communication. This paper focuses on cooperation incentive-based approaches for network architectures that support mobile devices and are challenged by mobility constraints such as battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. The surveyed approaches' merits and weaknesses are discussed, and open issues are identified. Finally, conclusions are detailed.

Cooperative Strategies for Challenged Networks and Applications: A Survey

We develop and analyze a new user-centric networking model for ubiquitous spectrum sharing where every user can share and use the spectrum under uncertainty of their traffic models. In this concept, users when connected to the Internet (wired/wireless) can dynamically serve as access points for other users in their vicinity. For this reason, the concept is referred to as user-centric distributed spectrum sharing. Each user in spectrum sharing mode utilizes a part of its available spectrum for its own traffic and remaining part to share with users in spectrum demanding modes. The model is designed as an operator supervised double-Stackelberg game with network operators, access points, and users as main players. We study network reliability and latency of the system under uncertainty of users’ traffic patterns. The numerical results show that the proposed model, depending on different settings, can significantly improve both profit and utility for network operators and users, respectively. Furthermore, network reliability is significantly improved depending on the network parameters for both users and operators.

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User-Centric Distributed Spectrum Sharing in Dynamic Network Architectures

Mobile social networking is becoming a new trend allowing users to have instant and real-time access from their devices to any Internet based networking platform. This requirement is not fulfilled by current wireless networks, which provide a limited number of wireless access points with instant Internet access. However, the flexibility of wireless technologies is giving rise to new types of wireless access networks, allowing the Internet to expand in a user-centric way. This new user-centric wireless networking trend aims to mitigate such problems, by allowing sharing of wireless resources for a faster and ubiquitous Internet access. The European project ULOOP—User-centric Wireless Local Loop is investigating new ways of deploying wireless local loops by means of low-cost technologies, where resource sharing is backed up by specific cooperation incentives and mechanisms. This paper aims to introduce the new concept of user-centric networks, an analysis of the most relevant incentive models, and a cooperative networking model to sustain the deployment of low-cost user-centric wireless networks based on cooperation incentives and mechanisms.

Cooperative Networking In User-Centric Wireless Networks

This paper goes over the concept of User-centric networking, as a paradigm for networking architectures usually located in the Customer Premises, and which is steadily changing the way the Internet has been devised. Such change is due to the fact that the Internet end-user is empowered due to novel approaches such as software defined networking, thus being in control of functionality that so far was restricted to be placed in the core and access regions of networks. Such change introduces the need to revisit home networking, and from an end-to-end perspective, to introduce new concepts and technology into the networking functionality. The paper presents a user-centric model and its functional blocks, and describes the architectural example that has been conceived, implemented, and validated in the context of the European project ULOOP—User-centric Wireless Local Loop.

User-Centric Networking

This survey discusses the human-perspective into networking through the Tactful Networking paradigm, whose goal is to add perceptive senses to the network by assigning it with human -like capabilities of observation, interpretation, and reaction to daily-life features and associated entities. To achieve this, knowledge extracted from inherent human behavior in terms of routines, personality, interactions, and others is leveraged, empowering the learning and prediction of user needs to improve QoE and system performance while respecting privacy and fostering new applications and services. Tactful Networking groups solutions from literature and innovative interdisciplinary human aspects studied in other areas. The paradigm is motivated by mobile devices’ pervasiveness and increasing presence as a sensor in our daily social activities. With the human element in the foreground, it is essential: (i) to center big data analytics around individuals; (ii) to create suitable incentive mechanisms for user participation; (iii) to design and evaluate both human-aware and system-aware networking solutions; and (iv) to apply prior and innovative techniques to deal with human-behavior sensing and learning. This survey reviews the human aspect in networking solutions through over a decade, followed by discussing the tactful networking impact through literature in behavior analysis and representative examples. This paper also discusses a framework comprising data management, analytics, and privacy for enhancing human raw-data to assist Tactful Networking solutions. Finally, challenges and opportunities for future research are presented.

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03139281/document

Tactful Networking: Humans in the Communication Loop

User Centric Networks (UCN) empowers the endusers as providers rather than just consumers of the network. Cooperation incentives based on reputation and crediting mechanisms are certain core enabling factors of UCN among which ensuring a certain level of QoS plays a great role for the maintenance of the UCN environment. In this paper we propose a QoS-based crediting mechanism, providing incentives for access points (APs) to share the load, i.e. the clients, in a fair way, thereby ensuring a homogenous level of QoS throughout the UCN community. We discuss a utility-based decision making framework for the incentivized cooperation based load balancing mechanism in UCN environment.

Cooperation incentives based load balancing in UCN: A probabilistic approach

The IEEE Wireless LAN standard has been a true success story by enabling convenient, efficient and low-cost access to broadband networks for both private and professional use. However, the increasing density and uncoordinated operation of wireless access points, combined with constantly growing traffic demands have started hurting the users' quality of experience. On the other hand, the emerging ubiquity of wireless access has placed it at the center of attention for network attacks, which not only raises users' concerns on security but also indirectly affects connection quality due to proactive measures against security attacks. In this work, we introduce an integrated solution to congestion avoidance and attack mitigation problems through cooperation among wireless access points. The proposed solution implements a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) as an intelligent distributed control system. By successfully differentiating resource hampering attacks from overload cases, the control system takes an appropriate action in each detected anomaly case without disturbing the quality of service for end users. The proposed solution is fully implemented on a small-scale testbed, on which we present our observations and demonstrate the effectiveness of the system to detect and alleviate both attack and congestion situations.

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User Facilitated Congestion and Attack Mitigation

We propose a user centric wireless testbed that interprets the user as a key component of the network control and operation. The testbed offers programmable entities in both core and access network edges, enabling researchers to implement cognitive and cooperative decision mechanisms for enhancing the end-to-end service experience. Moreover, a basic implementation of the knowledge plane is provided as a distributed repository on individual network elements, where end user devices can also act data providers. The testbed may serve the need for an experimental research environment for developing and testing such semantic and programmable network approaches that covers both wired and wireless domains.

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User Centric Wireless Testbed

In this chapter, we present an autonomous load balancing framework for the user centric networks (UCN), where the end-user participates to the wireless community either with (i) the provider role or (ii) the consumer role. The introduced framework is an improved application of a more comprehensive control and strategy optimization scheme [1]. Our main objective is to provide the UCN access points (AP) with the ability of executing load balancing algorithms and actions with higher success percentages by means of adapting to the changing environmental conditions. The proposed mechanism is a two layer decision-making framework. Firstly the probability distributions are generated over certain indicators for the environmental conditions. We call this step as the characterization stage for the operation environment, which constructs the belief states of the framework. To this end, we make use of Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. We introduce a new approach for the utilization of EM algorithm, where we neatly sidestep the necessity of prior assumptions over the distribution for a random parameter. In the second step, the success rate of available load balancing algorithms and actions are monitored based on the percentage of healing critical overloaded conditions. Hence more effective algorithm and environment pairs are constructed. For this objective, we introduce our Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) based control loop. We discuss on the necessity of POMDP utilization for the generic control loop in order to meet our goal of matching load balancing algorithms and different environments. This framework is fully implemented using the Java & C programming languages. The solution is validated with real testbed experimentations in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed model.

An Autonomous Load Balancing Framework for UCN

With the advent of revolutionary wireless technologies and equipments, one may expect a great user mobility. In this paper, we study the mobility of users in user centric networking (UCN) environment. We propose the mobility prediction approach by WLAN group formation. We focus on mobility behavior of users and propose the WLAN group prediction approach. We base the proposed approach on the relatively simple parameters and evaluate the performance of our proposed concept by real implementation. Our approach is based on building the history of encountered WLAN groups, modeling an encounter instance of a new group as arrivals for the proposed model and finally adapting the prediction. In the granular level, the arrival rates are estimated using expectation maximization algorithm. We believe that the proposed approach is important for UCN like environments, where information on the hardware or software capabilities, available network resources, instant AP load and etc are not available for the end-user.

Mürsel Yildiz

Papers

Cooperation incentives based load balancing in UCN: A probabilistic approach

User Facilitated Congestion and Attack Mitigation

User Centric Wireless Testbed

An Autonomous Load Balancing Framework for UCN

Mobility behavior modeling in UCN