Distributed localization and conflict detection in mobile wireless networks. (Localisation distribuée et détection de conflit dans les réseaux sans fil mobilesRéseau)

A mobile wireless network is a collection of mobile nodes connected via wireless links. The mobile node can be a person carrying a mobile terminal, an animal with an embedded sensor (electronic tag), a vehicle or any other mobile device with wireless communication capabilities. This thesis deals with two fundamental issues in mobile wireless networks: localization and conflict detection. Localization is the estimation of the absolute or relative positions of the mobile nodes. Conflict detection is the prediction of potential future conflicts between the mobile nodes. A conflict is a situation in which two or more mobile nodes are within an unsafe distance from one another. Conflict detection is a crucial requirement for mobile networks where the nodes can get too close to each other and collide. The first contribution of this thesis is a new weighted localization algorithm for mobile wireless networks. The proposed algorithm is distributed and requires low computational and communication overheads enabling its use in resource-limited nodes. In particular, a small set of nodes with known positions, called beacon nodes, are periodically broadcasting their coordinates. A mobile node with an unknown position collects the beacon nodes coordinates, attributes them weights based on different metrics (e.g, link quality, reception time) and finally estimates its position as the weighted average of all the collected coordinates. The second contribution of this thesis consists in a straight line conflict detection algorithm called SLIDE. SLIDE is distributed and lightweight: each mobile node uses simple mathematical inequalities in order to accurately and timely predict future conflicts with the surrounding nodes. Furthermore, SLIDE drops the restrictive assumption of perfect sensing capabilities and perturbation-free environment in order to guarantee its efficiency in real world applications. The third and last contribution of this thesis is a stochastic model that assesses the conflicts risks in a mobile wireless network where the mobile nodes are moving in the same shared space. Unlike most of the existing stochastic models, the proposed model is simple, generic and requires only two input parameters: the number of mobile nodes and the parameter λ characterizing the inter-contact time between a pair of mobile nodes. The parameter λ may be difficult to estimate experimentally. We therefore provide a generic explicit expression for λ and then specify this generic expression for two commonly used mobility models. All the contributions of this thesis are validated through extensive simulations based on the discrete-event simulator OMNeT++.