NEDG: Efficient Design and Control of Heterogeneous Mobile Networks: Beyond Poisson Regime

机动性是各种应用的核心，从在军事和灾难环境中搜索移动目标和救援任务的经典问题，到在敌对地形和水下部署移动自组织/传感器网络进行监视和数据通信。虽然这些网络中节点的随机移动模式被认为是不确定性和通信链路中断的主要来源，但如果适当控制和积极利用，它也可以促进可靠和可预测的性能。大多数现有的方法都利用了节点的移动性，只有无源车辆在偶然接触时进行数据转发，并过度简化了每对节点根据泊松过程相互接触的假设，这与最近经验观察到的各种移动网络中具有高度异质性的非泊松性质相矛盾。本研究的长期目标是开发一种统一的方法，用于在非泊松接触下的异构移动自组织网络和延迟/中断容忍网络中高效的协议设计和节点控制。目标进一步扩展到使用具有可控移动性的移动节点，可以自主地利用不断变化的多样性。这项研究的广泛影响在于它的跨学科性质，它解决了非泊松接触的移动性算法的分析和设计，这也是其他科学领域的核心，如流行病学，觅食生态学和生物学，所有这些都是由生物之间的接触驱动的。这种移动自组织网络与自然界各种现象之间的紧密关系，将为大一本科生甚至公众提供一个生动的例子。

Mobility is central to various applications, from the classicalproblems of searching for a moving target and rescue mission inmilitary and disaster settings, to deploying mobile ad-hoc/sensornetworks for surveillance and data communication over hostileterrain and underwater. While the random mobility pattern of nodes inthese networks has been considered as the main source of uncertainty anddisruption of communication links, it can also facilitate reliable andpredictable performance, if properly controlled and actively exploited.Most existing approaches have taken advantage of nodes' mobility only aspassive vehicles for data forwarding upon contact by chance, with anover-simplifying assumption that every pair of nodes is making contactswith each other according to a Poisson process, which is recentlycontradicted by empirically observed non-Poisson nature with high degreeof heterogeneity in various mobile networks.The long-term goal of this research is to develop a unified methodologyfor efficient protocol design and control of nodes in heterogeneousmobile ad-hoc networks and delay/disruption-tolerant networks undernon-Poisson contacts. The goal further extends to the use of mobilenodes with controllable mobility that can autonomously exploit thechanging diversity. The broader impact of this research lies in itsinterdisciplinary nature in addressing the analysis and design ofalgorithms running on mobility with heterogeneous non-Poisson contacts,which is also central to other scientific areas such as epidemiology,foraging ecology and biology, all driven by contacts among livingorganisms. This tight relationship between mobile ad-hoc networksand various phenomena in nature will serve as a vivid example forundergraduate students at a freshmen level or even to general public.