Autonomous Gossiping: A Self-Organizing Epidemic Algorithm for Selective Information Dissemination in Wireless Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks [chapter]

Anwitaman Datta, Silvia Quarteroni, Karl Aberer
2004 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
We introduce autonomous gossiping (A/G), a new genre epidemic algorithm for selective dissemination of information in contrast to previous usage of epidemic algorithms which flood the whole network. A/G is a paradigm which suits well in a mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) environment because it does not require any infrastructure or middleware like multicast tree and (un)subscription maintenance for publish/subscribe, but uses ecological and economic principles in a selforganizing manner in
more » ... to achieve any arbitrary selectivity (flexible casting). The trade-off of using a stateless self-organizing mechanism like A/G is that it does not guarantee completeness deterministically as is one of the original objectives of alternate selective dissemination schemes like publish/subscribe. We argue that such incompleteness is not a problem in many non-critical real-life civilian application scenarios and realistic node mobility patterns, where the overhead of infrastructure maintenance may outweigh the benefits of completeness, more over, at present there exists no mechanism to realize publish/subscribe or other paradigms for selective dissemination in MANET environments. (MANET) have, from being used exclusively in mission critical military and recovery operations, permeated into our daily life. In the recent years, mobile ad-hoc networking is gaining popularity for non critical civilian applications. This has come about with the proliferation of devices like mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, portable music (MP3) players which support ad-hoc networking enabled by technologies like IEEE 802.11b or Bluetooth. Infrastructure based cellular networks and MANETs have contrasting design, one based on dedicated infrastructure and global coordination, while the other is decentralized and selforganizing. But from application and usage point of view, most likely they will play complementary roles. Thus, despite the fact that most work done until now in MANET community has focussed on point-to-point routing, most likely communication with another particular node will not be the defining application for MANETs, because of the difficulties of route maintenance in a dynamic setting, and simultaneous communication between several pairs, and communication among long distance nodes. MANETs will instead do what peer-to-peer has done to the wired world, bringing the resources at the edges of the wireless network to collaborate together for better resource usage. Always using the infrastructure can be expensive, so using the MANET wherever possible can bring immense cost benefit to the end users, and also reduce the load on the infrastructure, as well as extend its coverage. Such coexistence of MANET and cellular network can be used for more purposes than one. -Multi-hop routing in cellular networks is used to extend the coverage of cellular networks. (e.g., [20]) -The MANET can be used as a cache, such that content can be discovered in a peer-to-peer manner whenever possible, instead of each user individually downloading it using the infrastructure. (e.g. [17, 25] ) -Using the MANET for geographically confined information dissemination or group communication. The focus of this paper is on information dissemination. There is an increasing opportunity for people to share resources (e.g., files) in a peer-to-peer manner, even in a wireless environment, using ad-hoc networking. One way to go about it is when a mobile node makes an explicit request for a resource, and the whole network is flooded with a query, as is the case with many mobile ad-hoc route discovery algorithms [27, 38] , similar to file discovery by query flooding in P2P networks like Gnutella [12] . Flooding in a wireless network is in fact relatively efficient as compared to in wired networks because of wireless multicast advantage [42] . Improvements of the basic flooding approach using advertisements and geographic information have also been recently studied [41] . The dual problem to searching resources in the network, that of disseminating resources selectively in a wireless mobile ad-hoc network is yet relatively unexplored, and is the focus of this paper. So far there exist mechanisms to broadcast information in the complete network [39] , or in a specific geographic area (Geocast) [35, 33] , apart from to any one specific mobile node (unicast/mobile ad-hoc routing [27, 38] ) or any one arbitrary node (anycast). But selective dissemination
doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30145-5_8 fatcat:6p6dduzzonfjfdotg3ndn6bdx4