Data Mule Service for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In service-driven mobile ad-hoc wireless networks (MANET), it is possible that due to mobility, the service requester (client) and the service provider are no longer in the same network when the service computation is completed, while they continue to be members of other mobile networks. Once the service is invoked and the computation is started, it is important to be able to eventually deliver the results to the requester. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of using highly mobile nodes as defined in service-driven MANET, as data mules. The hypothesis is that highly mobile nodes join a large number of networks and therefore have the best chance, among all nodes, to deliver the results to the requester. This is a best-effort solution that exploits the nodes´ mobility and connectivity. The paper includes simulation results for scarce and dense MANETs and two different service computation durations.