On-Demand Membership Service for Energy-Aware Networks

The development of wireless technology is conferring increasing importance to ad hoc networks. However, the specific features of such environments impose some limitations on the usability of a range of distributed protocols traditionally developed for wired networks and plugged computers. In particular, the generally limited power available to portable devices advises against the use of protocols that periodically exchange messages, as would be the case of a conventional membership service running on such a dynamically changing system. To overcome this problem, we propose a membership service on-demand that performs the costly tasks only when its client applications require them. We have defined and implemented a protocol that transforms a conventional membership service into an on-demand one. This yields a membership service suitable for energy-aware environments, that allows the members to save energy by avoiding the exchange of membership information when no user or component is making use of the membership services