Anonymous File Sharing in Delay Tolerant Networks

The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance has announced that 5G will be rolled out by 2020. Asmore and more bandwidth becomes available, it is critical to create a killer application that allows mobileusers to willingly utilize the abundant bandwidth. When we consider the case of passengers in vehicles, it isobvious that they need something entertaining to kill time during the traffic jam or while in a long trip. If wetry to learn from the past history of killer applications (e.g., Napster) and current trend (e.g., YouTube) on theInternet, it is likely that Multimedia File Sharing will become the next killer application in mobile networks,including VANETs, as Multimedia File Sharing can consume a large amount of bandwidth in 5G and it canalso be entertaining to passengers.However, in the case of Multimedia File Sharing, it is common that the content providers and consumersdo not want their identify be revealed. In other words, the success of Multimedia File Sharing largelydepends on the mechanism to keep people involved anonymous. Most of mobile networks, including VANET,are special cases of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). Hence, what we need dearly is an anonymous routingmechanism in DTNs.Unfortunately, while several anonymous routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc networks inthe past, these protocols either lack a rigorous performance analysis or are designed specifically for certainscenario. Until now, not much work has been done for anonymous routing on top of DTNs. In this project,we propose to study the anonymous routing mechanism in DTNs. Specifically, our proposed work targets thefollowing subtasks:1. A Framework for Anonymous Routing in DTNs – Some existing anonymous routing protocols providenice protection for source, the other for destination. We would like to propose an anonymous routingframework for DTNs which subsumes all of the existing solutions in the sense that the parameters of ourprotocol is tunable so that it behaves differently but works well for different scenarios.2. Performance Analysis for Anonymous Routing – While there are a number of anonymous routingprotocols, very few provide performance analysis. We would like to build a model to analyze theperformance of different anonymous routing protocols. This can help us gain more understandingtoward different types of anonymous routing protocols and lead us to a better protocol design.3. An Experiment Platform for DTN Study – While the concept of DTNs has been proposed for about adecade, so far no DTN experiment platform is available in Taiwan. We would like to make use of the“Green Bikes” available in National Central University campus to build a DTN experiment platform, sothat different protocols can be tested and verified on this platform.4. Deployment of Proposed Framework on Experiment Platform – Once we have completed the design ofthe anonymous routing framework and the DTN experiment platform, we would like to implement ourframework on the platform to validate the performance of our framework. While the size of the platformmay not be large (about 200 ~ 300 bikes), it should be more than enough for us to identify any issue ordrawback in our design.