PhD ThesisMobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-organizing wireless networks that consist
of mobile wireless devices (nodes). These networks operate without the aid
of any form of supporting infrastructure, and thus need the participating nodes to
co-operate by forwarding each other’s messages. MANETs can be deployed when
urgent temporary communications are required or when installing network infrastructure
is considered too costly or too slow, for example in environments such as
battlefields, crisis management or space exploration.
Consensus is central to several applications including collaborative ones which a
MANET can facilitate for mobile users. This thesis solves the consensus problem in
a sparse MANET in which a node can at times have no other node in its wireless
range and useful end-to-end connectivity between nodes can just be a temporary
feature that emerges at arbitrary intervals of time for any given node pair.
Efficient one-to-many dissemination, essential for consensus, now becomes a challenge:
enough number of destinations cannot deliver a multicast unless nodes retain
the multicast message for exercising opportunistic forwarding. Seeking to keep storage
and bandwidth costs low, we propose two protocols. An eventually relinquishing
(}RC) protocol that does not store messages for long is used for attempting at consensus,
and an eventually quiescent (}QC) one that stops forwarding messages
after a while is used for concluding consensus. Use of }RC protocol poses additional
challenges for consensus, when the fraction, f
n, of nodes that can crash is:
1
4 f
n < 1
2 .
Consensus latency and packet overhead are measured through simulation indicating
that they are not too high to be feasible in MANETs. They both decrease
considerably even for a modest increase in network density.Damascus University