FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Untraditional routing algorithms remain an open field for future applications and networks. New research can seek to integrate different routing mechanisms, or improve the untraditional algorithms, or yet to develop new routing proposals based on such social, biological and epidemic concepts. For example, there is a limited routing experience based on the Wasp model which may also be applied in the allocation of radio resources when there are multiple interfaces, as well as the optimization of routing and selection of networks.

The social model was presented as a way to extract the relationship and mobility pattern in order to improve the security and optimization over routing. Another interesting issue, not presented here, is with regard to building negotiation models. What information should be used to negotiate the communication between social networks? How to negotiate and apply policy routing among theses environment?

Although this chapter presented and evaluated a number of non-traditional routing stratégie s that future 4G networks could dwell from, there is still a considerable need for more studies of routing stimulus. This could be especially important for the integration of different 4G environments that internally may work with varying routing algorithms. For this reason, future work should seek to make a better analysis of some of the proposed routing ideas such as diffusion, chemotaxy, stigmergy and percolation. Such evaluations should be more complete in looking for the behavior of each algorithm in different 4G environments, including as disruptive network, delay tolerant network, short-range network, disaster recovery and overlay network. Moreover, new mathematical and possibly better calibrated models should accurately describe the result of blending and breeding this new class of routing algorithms.

A deeper knowledge of stimulus could be a first step to define a new policy architecture to control and manage future 4G networks. Further, work is also needed to understand the impact of policies on stimulus in order to enable their dynamic adjusting and routing customization. One expects to see studies showing how these classes of routing protocols may be calibrated and taken advantage of to suit different operating environments and requirements.