design of dependable personal networks
The notion of personal networks (PN) is a modus operandi in communication networking, which can simplify people's interactions with their personal devices. A PN is a user-centric network consisting of personal devices, regardless of their geographical locations. PNs provide users ubiquitous access to their personal resources and offer variety of personalized services to the users. Dependability of these networks is essential for their adoption by the end-user as a new communication paradigm. In this paper, for the first time, we rigorously analyze the dependability of PNs. Through fault analysis, we show that the routing mechanism can profoundly affect dependability of these networks. We focus on energy-efficiency as well as reliability of various routing protocols, to find out which routing mechanism can make PNs more dependable. In our evaluation, not only single-path protocols, but also multi-path protocols are considered. We argue that among different varieties of routing protocols, a protocol with backup routes, packet salvaging enhanced with cooperative caching, per-connection traffic allocation, and hybrid nature provides the best dependability for PNs. Our work paves the way toward dependable ubiquitous mobile computing using personal networks.
dependability personal networks routing personal area networks ad-hoc networks