Design and evaluation of crash tolerant protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks are wireless networks operating without any form of supporting infrastructure such as base-stations, and thus require the participating nodes to co-operate by forwarding each other's messages. Ad-hoc networks can be deployed when installing network infrastructure is considered too expensive, too cumbersome or simply too slow, for example in domains such as battlefields, search-and-rescue or space exploration. Tolerating node crashes and transient network partitions is likely to be important in such domains. However, developing applications which do so is a difficult task, a task which can be made easier by the availability of fault-tolerant protocols and middleware. This dissertation studies two core fault-tolerant primitives, reliable dissemination and consensus, and presents two families of protocols which implement these primitives in a wide range of mobile ad-hoc networks. The performance of the protocols is studied through simulation indicating that they are able to provide their guarantees in a bandwidth efficient manner. This is achieved by taking advantage of the broadcast nature and variable message delivery latencies inherent in ad-hoc networks. To illustrate the usefulness of these two primitives, a design for a distributed, fault-tolerant tuple space suitable to implement on mobile ad-hoc networks is presented. This design, if implemented, would provide a simple, yet powerful abstraction to the developer of fault-tolerant applications in mobile ad-hoc networks.