Providing reliable and fault tolerant broadcast delivery in mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks are making a new class of mobile applications feasib le. They benefit from the fast deployment and reconfiguration of the networ ks, are mainly characterized by the need to support many-to-many interactio n schema within groups of cooperating mobile hosts and are likely to use re plication of data objects to achieve performances and high data availabilit y. This strong group orientation requires specialized solutions that combin e adaptation to the fully mobile environment and provide the adequate level of fault tolerance. In this paper, we present the reliable broadcast proto col that has been purposely designed for mobile ad-hoc networks. The reliab le broadcast service ensures that all the hosts in the network deliver the same set of messages to the upper layer. It represents the building block t o obtain higher broadcast and multicast services with stronger guarantees a nd is an efficient and reliable alternative to flooding. The protocol is co nstructed on top of the wireless MAC protocol, which in turn sits over the clustering protocol. It provides an exactly once message delivery semantics and tolerates communication failures and host mobility. Temporary disconne ctions and network partitions are also tolerated under the assumption that they are eventually repaired, as specified by a Liveness property. The term ination of the protocol is proved and complexity and performance analyses a re also provided.