Protocol-independent packet delivery improvement service for mobile ad hoc networks

This paper addresses the issue of improving packet delivery for multicast in mobile, ad hoc networks and proposes a reliability improvement mechanism called protocol-independent packet delivery improvement service (PIDIS) to recover lost packets. PIDIS is a non-persistent, best-effort reliability improvement service that exploits the mechanism of swarm intelligence to make intelligent decisions about whence to fetch the lost packets. PIDIS employs the beneficial aspects of probabilistic routing and adapts well to mobility. PIDIS achieves probabilistic reliability and, unlike other gossip-based schemes, does not need to maintain information about group members from which lost packets are retrieved. Further PIDIS does not rely on any underlying routing protocol or primitive, and can be incorporated into any (unreliable) ad hoc multicast routing protocol. Lastly, because PIDIS is non-persistent, it does not incur any overhead when there is no lost message to be recovered. We incorporated PIDIS into ODMRP, and compared it against anonymous gossip (AG) implemented over ODMRP, and ODMRP. Our simulation results show that PIDIS+ODMRP in most cases, is more efficient and performs better than AG+ODMRP and ODMRP in terms of packet delivery, end-to-end delay and MAC layer overheads. We attribute the better performance and lower MAC overheads of PIDIS+ODMRP to the efficient gossiping made possible by using swarm intelligence techniques.