AbstractsComputer Science

There has been an immense popularity increase of mobile communication devices, such as smartphones and tablet PCs, due to the technical progress in equipment manufacturing and communication. Paired with the constantly growing availability of wireless broadband access over cellular networks the devices enable the continuous consumption of applications. Furthermore, they foster new types of applications, such as location-based services or mobile social networks, where the user interacts with its vicinity or nearby users. Due to the increasing popularity paired with the continuous consumption of applications cellular networks can hardly handle the resulting traffic that frequently exceeds their capacity. To unburden these networks mobile ad hoc networks represent a viable alternative, complementing or superseding cellular networks. Exploiting the growing density of mobile communication devices, mobile ad hoc networks rely on the direct interconnection of devices and provide an useful substrate to exchange information and to deploy applications. In particular, the direct device interaction reflects the communication and interaction pattern of location-based services and mobile social networks, which we term as locality of interaction. Despite the fact that mobile ad hoc networks represent a viable communication substrate, they are exhibiting highly dynamic characteristics, which are mainly attributable to the autonomous behavior of users. To handle the dynamic nature mobile ad hoc networks must be adapted to the current state of the network and the influencing conditions of the surrounding environment. In this regard, monitoring constitutes an inevitable aspect of mobile ad hoc networks. It collects information from the users and provides essential insights into the current network state, serving as basis to adapt the network. As mobile ad hoc networks are exclusively established by users without a central entity the users themselves must monitor the network and exploit the obtained monitoring information to adapt the network. Consequently, the issues arise that the users are in charge to measure and collect the monitoring information as well as to distribute the obtained insights among them. In addition to the information about the network state a user requires detailed information about its vicinity. The reason for the provisioning of location-dependent information results from the locality of interaction in mobile ad hoc networks: as a user can only interact with its neighborhood it particularly requires detailed monitoring information about its vicinity. In the context of monitoring we refer to this property as location-aware monitoring. To address the presented issues decentralized monitoring mechanisms have been introduced and developed. The participating users accomplish the mentioned tasks of monitoring and provide the required monitoring information. However, existing approaches for decentralized monitoring in mobile ad hoc networks exhibit certain shortcomings or make some limiting assumptions. Examples…