Message Delivery in Heterogeneous Disruption-Prone Networks

The vision of a world where users can be connected “anytime, anywhere”, considered futuristic only a decade ago, is now becoming reality. One critical enabling technology for “universal connectivity” is the ability to interconnect different types of networks, ranging from wired, infrastructure-based wireless (e.g., cellular-based networks, wireless mesh networks) to infrastructure-less wireless networks (e.g., mobile ad hoc networks, or MANETs, vehicular networks, or VANETs). Interconnecting such different networks presents several challenges including seamless message delivery. Additionally, a number of emerging applications such as environmental monitoring, emergency response, and vehicular communications, to name a few, require that future internetworks be tolerant to frequent, long-lived connectivity disruptions. Most current approaches, such as EDIFY [1] or CCN [2], only provide partial solutions to the heterogeneity problem faced by future internets. One of our research goals is to provide a flexible mechanism to bridge together infrastructure-based and infrastructureless networks even under intermittent connectivity. For this purpose, we have developed MeDeHa (Message Delivery in Heterogeneous, Disruption-prone Networks [3]), a framework to allow message delivery across an internet consisting of different types of networks. Unlike previous proposals, one of MeDeHa’s features is that it does not require any modification to existing MANET routing protocols. For this demonstration, we have implemented the MeDeHa framework on both a Linux-based testbed as well as the ns-3 simulator. This approach allows us to create a “hybrid” network that is composed of both real– and simulated nodes. Creating a hybrid network has several benefits over simulated or testbed-only networks. Testbed scenarios