Resumen de Real time communications in wireless ad-hoc networks. The rt-wmp protocol
Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) have been gaining increasing popularity in recent years thanks to their ease of deployment and the low cost of its components. No wired base station or infrastructure is needed since each host communicates one another via radio packets. In ad-hoc networks, routing protocols are challenged with establishing and maintaining multi-hop routes in the face of mobility, bandwidth limitation and power constraints.
However, as the technology and popularity of Internet grows, applications such as video conferencing that require Quality of Service (QoS) support are becoming more widespread. There are, however, situations in which guaranteeing a Quality of Service is not enough. This is the case of systems that rely on the guaranteed timely delivery of data as, for example, hard real-time systems where the loss or the late arrival of a single data can provoke serious issues. These new requirements, add difficulty to the already demanding problem of offering wireless communication among mobile stations belonging to a MANET.
In this PhD thesis, we propose a complete platform that tries to cope with all these problems. We propose a real-time wireless protocol for MANET capable of timely delivering of both unicast and multicast data. In addition it offers Quality of Service data transport without interfering with worst-case real-time characteristics. This platform is able to manage message priority and is, by design, capable of multi-hop communications even in presence of foreign traffic and interference.
It has been designed to work on top of the IEEE 802.11 protocol without needing hardware modifications. It has been conceived mainly to offer real-time wireless communication in small robot teams making possible the sharing of information such a kinematics or laser data. This aspect is in fact often neglected while is one of the most important issues in cooperative robotics. Its validity has been proved in several real experiments and applications including a connectivity enforcement framework as well as in underground communications.
