.FLYINGHEAD WIRELESS INFRASTRUCTURE
.TITLE Distributed management services in mobile ad-hoc networks
.AUTHOR Humayun Bakht
.SUMMARY Not long ago, mobile ad-hoc networks were introduced as a technology which can support data communication in places where it’s normally not possible to do so. Ideally, this type of networking is as an asset for network formation in areas which are affected because of some natural disaster, such as an earthquake or flooding. This article by Contributing Editor Humayun Bakht show you how mobile ad-hoc networks can be deployed to network various rescue workers working in an affected area.
.DEPT
Within mobile ad-hoc research community, different scenarios are under consideration which can give us more technical solutions to support spontaneous solutions for different computing devices. These solutions could possibly help emergency and rescue workers by providing an infrastructure for communication and information sharing.
Emergency and rescue applications must always be available, placing strong demands on middleware solutions running over mobile ad-hoc networks. This highly available distributed event notification service can reach the different network partitions and provide a useful delivery solution. One of the main aims of the ongoing research is to look at different rescue situations that might benefit from mobile devices. These scenarios include equipment delivery, medical diagnosis and treatment, and real-time evidence collections and management.
Among several technical challenges of mobile ad-hoc networks, the sharing of information among various computing devices can be regarded as one of the important issues. Information access and sharing is difficult in mobile ad-hoc networks because of their dynamic nature, scarce resources, and heterogeneous user devices.
A rescue scenario further complicates matters because of requirements llike fault tolerance, survivability, real-time operations, and security. Solving these issues from scratch for every new application based on a mobile ad-hoc network isn’t very feasible. A better solution would be to setup middleware services that can support the development of specific applications for the mobile ad-hoc network.
The dynamic nature of a mobile ad-hoc network makes middleware services unsuitable for synchronous communication because they are too vulnerable to communication disruptions. For example, devices might suddenly be out of reach or turned off. The classic alternative to synchronous solutions is a distributed event notification system, shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A This model illustrates a distributed management system for mobile ad-hoc networks.
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Mobile ad-hoc networks need an effective distributed management solution which can handle various tasks in emergency and rescue operations. This solution should be able to tackle some of the other components of a management system, such as resource management, privacy management and key management.
Resource management in a mobile ad-hoc network is used to track neighboring nodes and their resources to provide information for replication decisions. Privacy management is based on previously gathered certificates, and key management is used for signing and encrypting messages.
Therefore, it’s almost crucial to have each of these management issues well addressed at a satisfactorily level, or it’s simply not possible to have a powerful distributed management system which can cope with the typical environment of the mobile ad-hoc network.
.BIO
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