Wireless Ad Hoc Networking: Past, Present, and Future

David B. Johnson

Rice University

Friday, February 3, 2006
10:30am - SENSQ 5317

Refreshments at 10:00am

Hosted by José Brustoloni

Abstract

In an ad hoc network, individual wireless mobile nodes such as laptops or PDAs cooperate to form a network on their own. Ad hoc networks require no conventional networking infrastructure such as base stations or access points, and operate without centralized administration or control. Instead, each mobile node dynamically acts not only as a host but also as a router, forwarding packets for other nodes to allow nodes not within direct wireless transmission range of each other to communicate. The topology of the network can be very dynamic and can change rapidly, since radio transmission propagation is highly variable and since the nodes in the network may move at any time.

Ad hoc networking research has been going on since the beginnings of the Internet, and in fact was a substantial motivating factor for the Internet's very creation. Ad hoc networks have been used in military applications, and have potential in many areas such as emergency disaster relief, vehicular safety communication, and community Internet access. However, now over 30 years after the beginnings of this research, ad hoc networks have not yet seen widespread popular deployment and usage. In this talk, I will review some of the past of ad hoc networking research, describe some of the current activities and status in this area, and predict where I think the field is going and what is missing to get us there.

Biography of Speaker

David B. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. Prior to joining the faculty at Rice in 2000, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he had been on the faculty for eight years. Professor Johnson is leading the Monarch Project, developing adaptive networking protocols and architectures to allow truly seamless wireless and mobile networking. He has also been very active in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the principal protocol standards development body for the Internet. He was one of the main designers of the IETF Mobile IP protocol for IPv4 and was the primary designer of IETF Mobile IP for IPv6, and his group's Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR) for ad hoc networks has been approved by the IETF to be published as an Experimental protocol for the Internet.

Professor Johnson is the Chair of SIGMOBILE, the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing, and was previously the SIGMOBILE Treasurer for the past seven years. He has served as the General Chair for MobiCom 2003 and Technical Program Chair for VANET 2005, MobiHoc 2002, and MobiCom 1997. He has been a member of the Technical Program Committee for over 35 international conferences and workshops and has been an editor for the journals Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE Pervasive Computing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Wireless Networks, Mobile Networks and Applications, and Mobile Computing and Communications Review. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communications Society, USENIX, and Sigma Xi.