Abstract

[Note : Cecilia will be joining the Computer Lab in March, 2008.]

Most of the existing research work in mobile ad hoc networking is based on the assumption that a path exists between the sender and the receiver. On the other hand, applications of decentralised mobile systems are often characterised by network partitions. Examples include emergency support networks, military field networks, infostation-based systems for connectivity in remote areas and data collection in sensor networks for wildlife monitoring. As a consequence delay tolerant networking research has received considerable attention in the recent years as a means to obviate to the gap between ad hoc network research and real applications. In this talk I will describe our advances in the use of opportunistic routing in decentralized networks containing frequent and changing partitions. I will describe our context-aware routing model which uses Kalman Filters to predict the best carrier for messages among neighbouring nodes and its extensions to mobile sensor networks and publish/subscribe applications in human networks. I will report about the evaluation of the approaches through simulation with both social mobility and animal mobility models.