University teams from around the world gathered in Galveston, Texas in March for the MANIAC Challenge 2009. Shown here, the contestants are heading out to create an ad hoc wireless network through which each team will send and receive data traffic. (Photo by Michael Montgomery)
Student and research teams from around the world recently converged in Galveston, Texas, for MANIAC Challenge 2009 organized by faculty from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. University teams from seven countries tested network cooperation – and noncooperation – strategies.
The MANIAC (Mobile Ad-hoc Networking Interoperability And Cooperation) Challenge is designed to investigate cooperation and interoperability in ad hoc wireless networks and to encourage student interest in solving the complex issues involved. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the event was held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).
It is expected that wireless ad hoc networks will be established anywhere on demand and involve thousands of phones, radios, and other mobile devices that could work off each other to move data towards its destination. The challenge lies in trading off between self-interest and common network goals of the devices.
Student teams compete with two laptops, acting as nodes in the network. Teams program their participation strategies, deciding when to forward data packets for others and when to seek more favorable routes that avoid selfish nodes. Organizers generate traffic destined for each team, who then program a cooperation strategy in the network, dynamically making forwarding and routing decisions.
Teams are judged on how much of the traffic destined to them makes it through the network, how little energy they consume in forwarding traffic, and a subjective evaluation of the quality of their strategy design.
The team from the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany won the Performance Award and received a set of pervasive computing sensor platforms donated by Sentilla Corporation. The team from the Universita di Napoli Federico II, Italy, who won the Design Award, applied concepts of diversity and mutual information to the challenge of forwarding packet data for one’s neighbors.
Other teams included the Charles University of Prague, the University of Cyprus, the Arab Academy of Science and Technology in Egypt, the Technical University of Kosice in Slovakia, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, N.C., the University of Detroit Mercy, and Virginia Tech.
This year’s challenge was organized by Virginia Tech’s Luiz DaSilva, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and Allen MacKenzie, an assistant professor of ECE. Michael Thompson, an assistant professor at Bucknell University and a 2007 doctoral graduate of the ECE department at Virginia Tech, also served as an organizer.
Student travel grants were provided by Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering.
The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college’s 5,500 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a “hands-on, minds-on” approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 1,800 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology.