Description
Social networking has made its way into our daily lives today in the most popular form of Facebook and Twitter. In this thesis, we propose a variation of the theme of social networking where people may want to connect with unfamiliar people around them (through the exchange of "profile packets") based on similarity or complementarity of skill sets or needs in a Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANET) paradigm. MANET is a collection of selfconfiguring mobile nodes in an infrastructure-less network. As there is no fixed infrastructure, nodes dynamically transmit their data as and when it is generated. This model of asynchronous data transmission often leads to collisions of data packets. Reducing collision in MANET is one of the key research issues. Researches have proposed various methods to overcome this problem. Most of the solutions proposed so far, involves a multihop wireless network scenario. Our application comprises of mobile wireless devices (nodes) each of which creates its own "profile packet" and transmits it repeatedly to its neighboring nodes using a broadcast mechanism. Thus our network requires a single-hop, infrastructureless, asynchronous method of data transmission where the data at each mobile node is repetitive (there is rarely a change in the content of the profile packet of each node). The existing literature, to the best of our knowledge, do not address or analyze such a network scenario. In this thesis, we have modeled data arrival/generation and "ideal" periodicity of data broadcast using Poisson model and Markov model. We have further validated the results from these analytical models using a network simulation software - OPNET. We also present analytical results on power consumption and battery life of wireless devices. Based on the analytical results, we have proposed a scheme to select a periodic interval T at which a node should broadcast a profile packet for a given node-density in the network such that it reaches the maximum number of neighboring nodes within its radio range in the least acceptable time and expending absolute minimum power.
