Lightweight replication middleware for data and service components in dense MANETs

The increasing diffusion of wireless-enabled portable devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), i.e., in limited spatial regions, such as shopping malls, railway stations and airports, where a high number of mobile wireless peers autonomously cooperate, without the need for statically deployed network infrastructures. Dense MANET deployment scenarios can take advantage of high node population to replicate common-interest resources to increase their availability, by overcoming the unpredictable node exit from the dense region. The paper proposes a lightweight middleware, called REDMAN (replication in dense MANETs), to manage, retrieve and disseminate replicas of data/service components made available by cooperating nodes in a dense MANET. In particular, the paper focuses on the REDMAN original solutions to determine the nodes belonging to dense MANETs without exploiting any positioning system and also to elect dynamically a suitable replica manager node in charge of enforcing the desired resource replication degree in a lazy consistent way. Experimental results show that REDMAN solutions are lightweight and effective in dense MANET scenarios with almost constant node density and even high node mobility.