Support (mobile Framework)

Support (mobile Framework)

The work on the Support Framework investigates the problem of communication among mobile hosts, where topological connectivity is subject to frequent, unpredictable change.

For such dynamically changing networks the support framework proposes a set of protocols which exploit the coordinated (by the protocol) motion of a small part of the network in order to manage network operations. It is shown that such protocols can be designed to work correctly and efficiently for communication by avoiding message flooding. The protocols manage to establish communication between any pair of mobile hosts in small, a-priori guaranteed expected time bounds. Theoretical analytical results exploit and further develop some fundamental properties of random walks in finite graph.

Apart from studying the general case of mobile ad-hoc networks, the framework investigates two practical and interesting cases of ad-hoc mobile networks:

• hierarchical ad-hoc networks,
• highly changing ad-hoc networks,

for which specific protocols are proposed that efficiently deal with the problem of basic communication.