Workshop Proposal on Theoretical Aspects of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Illinois Institute Of Technology, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The term \emph{peer-to-peer}(P2P) came to the force very publicly with the rise and fall of Napster. Although there are prior systems in this evolutionary phase of distributed computing, P2P system first emerges as a significant social and technical phenomenon right after the deployment of Napster. Currently most of popular P2P systems are aiming at the file sharing applications, where files are stored at some end-users' machines rather than at a central server in the traditional client/server model. Wireless ad hoc networking is just a special case of P2P networking, where no infrastructure or celluar networking is needed for communication. Recent years saw a great amount of research in wireless ad hoc networks. These works involve a number of theoretical aspects of computer science, including approximation algorithms, computational geometry, combinatorics, distributed algorithms. However, there are still many challenges in wireless ad hoc networks. Due to the limited capability of processing power, storage, and energy supply, many conventional algorithms are too complicated to be implemented in a wireless ad hoc networks. Some other algorithms did not take advantage of the geometry nature of the wireless networks. Additionally, most of the currently developed algorithms for wireless networks assumed a precise position of each wireless node, which is impossible practically. Majority of the algorithms developed in this area also assume all nodes have uniform transmission range. These algorithms will likely fail when nodes have disparity transmission ranges. Furthermore, the wireless ad hoc networks requires efficient distributed algorithms with low computation complexity and low communication complexity. These algorithms are expected to take advantage of the geometry nature of the wireless ad hoc networks. Several fundamental questions should be answered: can we improve the performance of traditional distributed algorithms under wireless ad hoc networks? Does the position information of wireless nodes make difference in algorithms' performance? We propose to organize a workshop to solicit the recent research efforts on addressing these challenges. Specific topics include but are not limited to the following issues: Deployment for Connectivity, Deployment for Coverage, Throughput, Mobility, Channel Assignment, Power/Topology Control, Localized Routing, Cooperation Enforcement and Mechanism Design, Security. A number of junior faculty and graduate students from both domestic and international have been actively working on addressing some of these challenges. They will be the main component of potential attendees of this workshop. The workshop is intended to bring together researchers in mobile computing and distributed algorithms to foster cooperation. It is intended to be a lively meeting, covering many of the algorithmic and discrete aspects of this field going from operations research to radio engineering problems. It aims, in particular, at fostering the cooperation among practitioners and theoreticians of the field. We plan to hold this workshop on June 2nd, 2004 at Chicago, Illinois. Workshop papers will be published in workshop proceedings and selected papers will be published in a special issue of a journal. By organizing the workshop on the theoretic aspects of wireless ad hoc networks that addresses the a number of challenge and fundamental problems. The potential attendees of the workshop will be junior faculty and senir PhD students who had been actively working in the theoretic aspects of wireless ad hoc networks. Thus, a successful workshop will initiate more junior faculty and PhD students in the research of this area. Our own experiences in working with PhD students has been excellent. Our currently supported Ph.D. students have already contributed to considerable number of papers published in major theoretical and/or networking conferences. Exposure to this workshop organized by National Science Foundation will increase their productivity. Since the proposed research activities involve theoretical understanding and solving of practical questions from wireless networking, the proposed workshop will foster collaborations with faculties from other discipline, some researchers from industry to verify the developed theoretical methods in a more practical settings to see its practical performance. Additionally, since ad hoc networks support applications related to disaster relief, public event coordination, and military and law enforcement operations, the proposed research has vast societal impact.