Assar Westerlund

Spontaneous networking: an application oriented approach to ad hoc networking

An ad hoc network must operate independent of a preestablished or centralized network management infrastructure, while still providing administrative services needed to support applications. Address allocation, name resolution, service location, authentication, and access control policies represent just some of the functionality that must be supported-without preconfiguration or centralized services. In order to solve these problems, it is necessary to leverage some aspect of the environment in which the network operates. We introduce the notion of a spontaneous network, created when a group of people come together for some collaborative activity. In this case, we can use the human interactions associated with the activity in order to establish a basic service and security infrastructure. We structure our discussion around a practical real-world scenario illustrating the use of such a network, identifying the key challenges involved and some of the techniques that can be used to address them.

Spontnet: experiences in configuring and securing small ad hoc networks

In contrast with work focusing on routing problems in mobile ad hoc networks, we address the problem of system configuration in such networks. In particular, we are interested in ways to instantiate the configuration infrastructure - naming, addressing, authentication, and key distribution

The design of a multicast-based distributed file system

needed to establish small-to-medium scale ad hoc networks supporting collaborative applications. We argue that, in such spontaneous networks, much of the necessary infrastructure can be derived from the face-to-face human interactions that these networks are intended to facilitate. This approach has the additional advantage of being intuitive for the nonexpert user. We describe Spontnet, our prototype implementation of a simple ad hoc network configuration utility based on these ideas. Spontnet allows users to distribute a group session key without previous shared context and to establish shared namespace. Two applications, a simple Web server and a shared whiteboard, are provided as examples of collaborative applications that could be useful in a spontaneous networking environment.