Related Info

NEW MANIAC'09 API
The new MANIAC Challenge 2009 API is available for download! Click here to download .. ...

Register for MANIAC'09

Get Maniac Ready

Travel Grants

Recent Presentations

MANIAC 2007

MANET Testbed Data sets

Where Discoveries Begin
The MANIAC Challenge is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0519825

MANIAC Challenge'09

MANIAC Challenge will next be held on March 8-9 at PerCom 2009 Galveston, Texas. More details will be posted shortly.

What is the MANIAC Challenge?

The MANIAC Challenge is an NSF-funded competition to better understand cooperation and interoperability in ad hoc networks. Competing teams of students/researchers will come together to form an ad hoc network. The organizers will generate traffic destined to each team. Teams will be judged based on how much of the traffic destined to them makes it through the network, how little energy they consume in forwarding traffic and a subjective evaluation of the quality of their solution's design. To get their traffic across the network, each team must rely on other teams' willingness to forward traffic for them. We have developed software and an API to allow teams to program their nodes and override forwarding decisions made by the routing protocol. We have also developed network monitoring and management software to keep track in real-time of topology changes and traffic loads experienced by each node during the competition. In this website, you will find the detailed rules for participation in the MANIAC Challenge, how to register for the competition, and the required software available for download.

In the MANIAC challenge,traffic is sent to participant nodes from reference nodes in the network. Teams are given the tools to monitor and manipulate traffic flowing around and through them, respectively. As teams participate and forward , they consume resources (lose points), but as traffic affiliated with them reaches its destination, they receive points. The overall goal of the competition to have the most points at the end of the competition.

Goal of MANIAC Challenge Project

This project establishes a multi-institution competition. The MANIAC Challenge, that allows us to study the tension between the desire of nodes to focus only on delivery of their team's packets (in order to preserve battery life and competitive advantage) and the need for nodes in a MANET to cooperate in order to permit the delivery of packets across the heterogeneous network. Click here for the flyer.

Organizers

The principal investigators for the MANIAC Challenge are Dr. Luiz DaSilva and Dr. Allen MacKenzie, from Wireless @ Virginia Tech. Dr. Michael Thompson, of Bucknell University, is also a collaborator in this project.