Contact-based buffering for delay-tolerant ad hoc broadcasting

• Published in: Computer communications 2007-11, Vol.30 (16), p.3144-3153
• Main Author: Khelil, Abdelmajid
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Broadcast; Buffering; Delay-tolerant networking; MANET; Network partitioning
• ISSN: 0140-3664; 1873-703X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.comcom.2007.05.042

Mobility plays a major role in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), since it stresses networking tasks such as routing on the one hand, but aids to increase the network capacity and to overcome network partitioning on the other hand. To benefit from node mobility, a new class of MANET protocols and applications are designed to be delay-tolerant and mobility-aided. The main communication paradigm here is store-and-forward. For delay-tolerant mobility-aided networking, mobility on a large time-scale is a key feature. So far however, a few work is done to adapt store-and-forward concepts to the large time-scale mobility. In order to simplify the adaptation to node mobility, we first present a set of novel mobility metrics that quantify the mobility on a large time-scale and that are based on the pair-wise contacts between mobile nodes. Then, we show how to exploit these mobility metrics to design an efficient buffering strategy for hypergossiping, a delay-tolerant mobility-aided MANET broadcasting protocol. The novel buffering strategy detects relevant mobility patterns at run-time, using contact-based mobility metrics, and adapts the buffering decision to the detected mobility pattern.