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

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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.