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., 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, 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 both to determine the nodes belonging to dense MANETs without exploiting any positioning system and to dynamically elect 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