Title: Context-Awareness in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Author: Apostolis Malatras
e-mail: A.Malatras@surrey.ac.uk
Partner: UniS
Supervisor: George Pavlou
Committee:
Year of start: 2003
Year of end: 2007
Funding institution: Thales TRT UK, University of Surrey

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) constitute an emerging communication paradigm that can potentially enable pervasive communications and computing. Their ease of deployment and the lack of centralised control make them suitable for a wide range of novel applications. On the other hand they also have drawbacks since they are characterised by a certain degree of instability, which may affect reliability and wide application deployment. As such, there is a need for techniques that mitigate these problems. In this respect, we assert that context awareness can assist in building more predictable and thus more reliable MANETs by providing higher and lower level information regarding the mobile node’s context, which can aid in predicting its mobility patterns. When the mobility of every node is predicted, the future topology of the network can be foreseen facilitating thus the construction of reliable, relatively long-lived routes. The term context is used to denote all the information accessible by the mobile node and descriptive of its surroundings whether they refer to computational or physical properties. Aspects of the research include:

• Algorithms to process the diversity of context information in order to infer the future mobility patterns of the mobile nodes.
• Extensions to ad hoc routing protocols to enable them to take into account mobility as derived from context information.
• Context management in mobile ad hoc networks, i.e. communicating, storing and accessing context information in a scalable fashion.
• Mobile ad hoc network programmability.
• Enabling autonomic aspects in mobile ad hoc networks through the integration of context awareness, network programmability and policy-based network management.

1. A. Malatras & G. Pavlou, A practical framework to enable the self-management of mobile ad-hoc networks, IEEE Global Information Infrastructure Symposium (GIIS) 2007, Marrakech, Morocco, July 2007
2. A. Malatras, A. Hadjiantonis, G. Pavlou, Exploiting Context-awareness for the Autonomic Management of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, to appear in the Journal of Network and System Management (JNSM), special issue on Autonomic Pervasive and Context-aware Systems, Vol. 15, No. 1, Springer, March 2007.
3. A. Hadjiantonis, A. Malatras, G. Pavlou, A Context-aware Policy-based Framework for the Management of MANETs, Proc. of the IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (Policy’2006), Ontario, Canada, pp. 23-32, IEEE, June 2006
4. A. Malatras, G. Pavlou, P. Belsis, S. Gritzalis, C. Skourlas, I. Chalaris, Deploying Pervasive Secure Knowledge Management Infrastructures, International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications – Best Papers of IEEE ICPS 2005, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 265-276, 2005, Troubador Publishing
5. A. Malatras, G. Pavlou, Context-driven Self-Configuration of Mobile Ad hoc Networks, Proc. of the IFIP International Workshop on Autonomic Communications (WAC’2005), Athens, Greece, pp. 71-85, Springer, October 2005
6. A. Malatras, G. Pavlou, P. Belsis, S. Gritzalis, S. Skourlas, I. Chalaris, Secure Distributed Knowledge Management in Pervasive Environmnets, Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS’2005), Santorini, Greece, IEEE, July 2005
7. A. Malatras, G. Pavlou, S. Gouveris, S. Sivavakeesar, V. Karakoidas, Self-Configuring and Optimizing Mobile Ad hoc Networks, Poster, Proc. of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’2005), Seattle, USA, June 2005
8. S. Gouveris, S. Sivavakeesar, G. Pavlou, A. Malatras, Programmable Middleware for the Dynamic Deployment of Services and Protocols in Ad hoc Networks, Proceedings of the IEEE/IFIP Integrated Management Symposium (IM’2005), Nice, France, pp. 3-16, IEEE, May 2005
9. A. Malatras, G. Pavlou, Intelligent context-aware middleware for MANETs, Proceedings of the IEE 2004 London Communication Symposium