Building resource aware middleware services over MANET for rescue and emergency applications

In the ad-hoc InfoWare project we investigate middleware solutions for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) used in emergency and rescue situations. One goal in the project is to increase availability of services and information through resource awareness. In this context we regard the ability to predict with a certain confidence the future resource availability as very helpful. The work described in this paper, presents our current progress towards prediction of future connectivity between nodes using information about a node´s neighborhood extracted from the routing protocol. The simple idea is that if two nodes have been close to each other for a certain time, there is a high probability that they will be close also in the immediate future. The advantage with our approach is that the nodes do not need location information. We are using simulation to analyze for how far into the future we can make valid predictions