NeTS-WN: Collaborative Data Access in Wireless P2P Networks

Wireless P2P networks, such as ad hoc networks, mesh networks, and sensor networks, have received considerable attention due to their potential applications in many civilian and military environments. The design of such networks that consider performance and power optimization has become a recent research focus.

As nodes in wireless P2P networks may perform similar tasks using common data sets, collaborative data access, which allows sharing and coordination of cached or replicated data among multiple nodes, can be used to reduce the bandwidth and power consumption. The specific goal of this project is to provide a collaborative data access framework for wireless P2P networks.

The project addresses four intertwined issues: (i) various cooperative caching schemes will be designed, implemented, and evaluated; (ii) suitable cache replacement and cache admission control algorithms are proposed and evaluated to balance the tradeoffs between access latency and data accessibility; (iii) novel data replication and data discovery techniques are investigated to further reduce the access latency and increase the data accessibility; (iv) possible security violations to maintain data consistency will be identified, and solutions to defend against such attacks will be proposed. The project will make significant theoretical advances in understanding and designing wireless P2P networks using the collaborative data access concept, and will develop a comprehensive software support for collaborative data access in wireless P2P networks.

The success of this project is likely to have a broader impact on making wireless P2P networks more affordable and amenable to commercial, civilian, and military applications. The results of the project will be disseminated widely through high-quality publications and discussions. The proposed research will also be integrated with the education curricula at Penn State.