The MANIAC Challenge - Educational Experiences in Ad Hoc Networking

by Luiz A. DaSilva, Allen B. MacKenzie, Michael S. Thompson, and Eileen Q. Baumann

Graduate and undergraduate students from seven universities roamed the hallways of the Washington Hilton for two days last November, sporting maroon t-shirts and armed with open laptops. The students were competing for glory in a technical contest, while creating a one-of-a-kind mobile ad hoc network (manet) for research in networking and pervasive computing.

The Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Interoperability and Cooperation (MANIAC) Challenge has two goals. It exposes graduate and undergraduate students to experimental research on wireless networks. It also provides a unique opportunity to study actual, uncontrolled, ad hoc networks, where users make their own decisions regarding trade-offs between self-interest and common network goals.

Manets are wireless networks that are deployed dynamically, on demand, without the need for infrastructure. If their promise is fulfilled, they will eventually be established anywhere, potentially involving hundreds or even thousands of radios, PDAs, mobile phones, and laptops. In a manet, each device might require the assistance of neighboring devices to move data from one place to another. Such cooperation is imperative to network operation as a whole. However, because these are personal devices with limited resources (battery power, storage, processing capabilities), users might want to limit use of the devices to conserve resources. Two questions remain: Can a network of selfish parties function? And, if so, what behaviors and characteristics will emerge in such a network? These questions are the starting point for the MANIAC Challenge project.

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