Comparison of Service Management Architectures in MANETs

Service management in mobile ad hoc networks is a challenging task due to the inherent properties of such networks (eg., lack of central infrastructure, error-prone wireless connections, limited resources). Traditional management architectures follow either the centralized client/server or the distributed peer-to-peer model. The former shows low fault tolerance since the latter suffers from limited scalability. As a compromise, a hybrid, zone-based architecture can offer solutions for these shortcomings. In this paper, we compare the zone-based architecture to the client/server and peer-to-peer approaches. To select the zone servers and maintain the zones we use our previously developed algorithm called PBS. Via simulations we show how the zone-based architecture over performs the other approaches in the sense of fault tolerance and scalability.