Section: Scientific Foundations

Autonomous Wireless Networking

The previously described mechanisms allow to manage efficiently the radio resource in the neighborhood of a node by taking into account the different wireless interactions. Next, to support the expected massive deployment of wireless nodes on machines or things, the routing issue becomes a very complex problem and should be revisited in the context of distributed wireless networks, particularly if we want to take benefit from agile radio, opportunistic radio links and non-symmetric neighbors. Because of the large-scale dimension of the networks we consider that centralized approaches should be dismissed to the benefit of distributed and localized protocols: based on local information and local interactions, the aim is to synthesize a global behavior in terms of routing, data gathering, etc. The most important issues deal with capacity and resource management, activity scheduling, topology control and protocols adaptability to the evolution of the network topology. Because such features need to be human-free, they are often referred to as the self-* paradigm which will drive our research effort. Hence, cooperation among nodes is also a tool that can be considered at the networking layer. However, such cooperative techniques will be carefully designed since they can trigger additional overhead in the network thus reducing the benefits of adaptability. Since network topologies are constantly evolving due to the mobility of the nodes and the variability of the radio links properties, fault-tolerant protocols are needed to guarantee robustness and self-stabilization. Finally, this self-* paradigm opens critical security problems since transmission reliability and security will rely on many intermediate relays. We will look further to find mechanisms to ensure safe data transmissions in a fully interactive and reconfigurable digital world.

The third challenge deals with routing and self-organization mechanisms in large scale heterogeneous networks, optimized with respect to our three constraints (QoS, Energy consumption and Security), while exploiting cognitive and agile radio mechanisms.