The MANIAC Challenge: Exploring MANETs through competition

In this paper we discuss the MANIAC Challenge, a cooperative and competitive approach to MANET networking research. Our goal was to create an opportunity for researchers to come together and compete in a MANET-based competition where points were awarded for received traffic and deducted for use of node resources, including packet forwarding. Using software we created, each team built a participation strategy that allowed them to decide how much they would participate in forwarding traffic for other nodes. This exercise turned out to be a resounding success and a wealth of data was gathered about traffic patterns, network behavior, node behavior, and the impact of node participation strategies on the MANET. The major observations of this work are that location and hardware can affect node performance, node participation can affect the larger network in some circumstances, and node mobility patterns can vary based on the goal of the node.