Wireless networking “maniacs” compete again in 2009 MANIAC Challenge
Students and faculty members from seven countries in three continents competed in the second Mobile Ad-hoc Networking Interoperability And Cooperation (MANIAC) Challenge, held in Galveston, Texas, in conjunction with IEEE PerCom. The competition, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Networking Technologies and Systems (NeTS) program, investigates cooperation and selfishness in a self-organizing ad hoc network. Student teams program their participation strategies, deciding when to forward packets for others and when to seek more favorable routes that avoid selfish nodes. Each team participates with two laptops, which act as two nodes in the network. Felix Juraschek, one of the members of the team from the Freie Universitaet Berlin that won the Performance Award, characterized the competition as a “new and exciting experience to gather on this experimental level.” Marcello Caleffi, from the Universita di Napoli Federico II, sought inspiration in information theory to design his strategy, which applies concepts of diversity and mutual information to the problem of whether and when to forward packets for one’s neighbors. His strategy won the Design Award.
The team from the Arab Academy of Science and Technology, in Egypt, was inspired by the behavior of the mongoose to design their strategy. The youngest team to compete in MANIAC came from the University of Cyprus. The team was composed of three third-year undergraduates, who said that the experience allowed them to better understand how a real wireless network works. Other teams came from the Charles University of Prague, in the Czech Republic, the Technical University of Kosice, in Slovakia, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Detroit Mercy.
The organizers of the 2009 MANIAC Challenge are Profs. Luiz DaSilva and Allen MacKenzie, from Virginia Tech, the principal investigators for this NSF-funded project, and Prof. Michael Thompson, from Bucknell University. Student travel grants were provided by Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, and additional support for the competition was provided by CoCo Communications. One of the winning teams received a set of pervasive computing sensor platforms donated by Sentilla Corporation.