Abstract: Mobile ad hoc networks form a vital component in realizing the vision of rapidly deployed communications capability in environments with little or no pre-installed infrastructure. Such environments arise in critical situations ranging from battlefield scenarios to natural and human-made disaster events. Most ad hoc network routing and data forwarding algorithms are designed for networks that are always connected. Node mobility, limited radio range, physical obstacles, severe weather, wide deployment area or other physical factors, might preclude some nodes from communicating with others and result in a partitioned network. In this talk, I will first describe a novel taxonomy for mobile wireless networks which admits various ranges of disconnection and mobility. I will then describe our work which is concerned with the development of a ``Message Ferrying'' (MF) scheme, inspired by its real life analog, that implements a non-traditional 'store, carry and forward' routing paradigm using node mobility to overcome network partitioning. In the MF scheme, a set of mobile nodes called message ferries take responsibility for carrying messages between disconnected nodes.

I will summarize some of our research efforts in the design and evaluation of efficient data delivery services using message ferrying techniques. These include: 1) design of ferry routing schemes for single and multiple interacting ferries, 2) protocols that make use proactive node and ferry mobility, 3) use of message ferries to save energy and 4) providing for fault tolerance in MF systems.

Short Bio: Mostafa Ammar is a Regents' Professor with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He has been with Georgia Tech since 1985. He received the S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1985. Dr. Ammar's research interests are in network architectures, protocols and services. He has contributions in the areas of multicast communication and services, multimedia streaming, content distribution networks, network simulation, and wireless disruption tolerant networks.

Dr. Ammar has co-authored over 170 publications in journals and conferences. He was the co-recipient of the Best Paper Awards at the 7th WWW conference for the paper on the 'Interactive Multimedia Jukebox' and the 2002 Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) conference for the paper on 'Updateable Network Simulation'. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking from 1999 to 2003. Dr. Ammar is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM.