Minimum Disruption Service Composition and Recovery over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks poses fundamental challenges to the design of service composition schemes that can minimize the effect of service disruptions. Although improving reliability has been a topic of extensive research in mobile ad hoc networks, little work has considered service deliveries spanning multiple components. Moreover, service composition strategies proposed for wireline networks are poorly suited for wireless ad hoc networks due to their highly dynamic nature. This paper proposes a new service composition and recovery framework designed to achieve minimum service disruptions for mobile ad hoc networks. The framework consists of two-tiers: service routing, which selects the service components, and network routing, which finds the network path that connects these service components. Our framework is based on the disruption index, which is a novel construct that characterizes different aspects of service disruptions, including frequency and duration. For ad hoc networks with known mobility plan, we formulate the problem of minimum-disruption service composition and recovery (MDSCR) as a dynamic programming problem and give its optimal solution. Based on the derived analytical insights, we present our MDSCR heuristic algorithm for ad hoc networks with uncertain node mobility. This heuristic algorithm approximates the optimal solution with one-step lookahead prediction, where service link lifetime is predicted using linear regression. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm via simulation study conducted under various network environments.