Real world MANETs often exhibit an inherent community structure in their topological connectivity and in the evolution of the topology over time. Such temporal community structure of MANETs has been shown to be extremely useful in improving the performance of routing and content-based routing in MANETs. However, detecting temporal communities in a completely distributed and real time manner is a hard problem, and it is often performed offline with knowledge of the full network topology over time. We propose CLAN, a distributed and real-time protocol for detecting temporal communities in MANETs. CLAN is an adaptation of the Label Propagation algorithm to distributed and time-varying graphs that MANETs are. A key novel component of CLAN is local rules for community rediscovery as the network evolves. CLAN also uses a weighted version of the network topology where the weights are defined using a novel notion of social entropy to promote stability of communities. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that CLAN is quick to converge, incurs minimal overhead and is as effective as centralized approaches to temporal community detection. We also demonstrate how the temporal community structure can be used by designing a hierarchical routing protocol that achieves the delivery ratio of the OLSR routing protocol at a fraction of the overhead.

The prominence of wireless, mobile devices on the Internet today has motivated numerous protocols and architectures, such as the MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture project. In this work, we present a robust, local-scale, storage-aware routing approach, called GSTAR, for use in Mobility-First networks. GSTAR unifies techniques from MANET and DTN routing protocols. This unification with in-network storage enables it to overcome mobility-related challenges such as link quality variation, node disconnection, and network partitioning. Through NS3-based simulation, we show that GSTAR outperforms traditional link-state protocols for both wireless and hybrid wired-wireless network environments.

Popular anonymous communication systems often require sending packets through a sequence of relays on dilated paths for strong anonymity protection. As a result, increased end-to-end latency renders such systems inadequate for the majority of Internet users who seek an intermediate level of anonymity protection while using latency-sensitive applications, such as Web applications. This paper serves to bridge the gap between communication systems that provide strong anonymity protection but with intolerable latency and non-anonymous communication systems by considering a new design space for the setting. More specifically, we explore how to achieve near-optimal latency while achieving an intermediate level of anonymity with a weaker yet practical adversary model (i.e., protecting an end-host's identity and location from servers) such that users can choose between the level of anonymity and usability. We propose Lightweight Anonymity and Privacy (LAP), an efficient network-based solution featuring lightweight path establishment and stateless communication, by concealing an end-host's topological location to enhance anonymity against remote tracking. To show practicality, we demonstrate that LAP can work on top of the current Internet and proposed future Internet architectures.

The widespread availability of mobile wireless devices offers growing opportunities for the formation of temporary networks with only intermittent connectivity. These intermittently-connected networks (ICNs) typically lack stable end-to-end paths. In order to improve the delivery rates of the networks, new store-carry-and-forward protocols have been proposed which often use message replication as a forwarding mechanism. Message replication is effective at improving delivery, but given the limited resources of ICN nodes, such as buffer space, bandwidth and energy, as well as the highly dynamic nature of these networks, replication can easily overwhelm node resources. In this work we propose a novel node-based replication management algorithm which addresses buffer congestion by dynamically limiting the replication a node performs during each encounter. The insight for our algorithm comes from a stochastic model of message delivery in ICNs with constrained buffer space. We show through simulation that our algorithm is effective, nearly tripling delivery rates in some scenarios, and imposes little overhead.

Current work in routing protocols for delay and disruption tolerant networks leverage epidemic-style algorithms that trade off injecting many copies of messages into the network for increased probability of message delivery. However, such techniques can cause a large amount of contention in the network, increase overall delays, and drain each mobile node's limited battery supply. We present a new DTN routing algorithm, called Encounter-Based Routing (EBR), which maximizes delivery ratios while minimizing overhead and delay. Furthermore, we present a means of securing EBR against black hole denial- of-service attacks. EBR achieves up to a 40% improvement in message delivery over the current state-of-the-art, as well as achieving up to a 145% increase in goodput. Also, we further show how EBR outperforms other protocols by introduce three new composite metrics that better characterize DTN routing performance.