Mobile Offloading in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: The Tightness Strategy

This paper describes a strategy that was designed, imple-mented, and presented at theMobile Ad Hoc Networking In-teroperability and Cooperation (MANIAC) Challenge 2013. The theme of the challenge was “Mobile Data Offloading,” and consisted on developing and comparatively evaluating strategies to offload infrastructure access points via cus-tomer ad hoc forwarding using handheld devices. According to the challenge rules, a hop-by-hop bidding contest should decide the path of each data packet towards its destination. Consequently, each team should rely on other teams ’ willing-ness to forward packets for them in order to get their traffic across the network. Following these rules, this paper pro-poses a strategy that is based on the concept of how “tight” a node is to successfully deliver a packet to its destination within a given deadline. This “tightness ” idea relies on a shortest-path analysis of the underlying network graph, and it is used to define three sub-strategies that specify a) how to participate in an auction; b) how to announce an auc-tion; and c) how to decide who wins the announced auction. The proposed strategy seeks to minimize network resource utilization and to promote cooperative behavior among par-ticipant nodes. 1