Voila`: delivering messages across partitioned ad-hoc networks

Many routing protocols have been developed to establish and maintain routes in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). They try to address the unique challenges that MANETs present over traditional wired networks. Some of these challenges are: use of unreliable wireless medium for communication; frequent change in topology; lack of a central authority to arbitrate communication in the network. These protocols find a route to a destination, if such a route exists. However in the wireless medium, links are susceptible to frequent failures which can cause partitions in the network. Current routing protocols use a passive delivery approach for packets destined to a host in another partition. Packets destined to a disconnected host are dropped after some route repair attempts. The paper presents a novel protocol, Voila`, that delivers messages across disconnected hosts. Voila` uses nodes moving between the source and destination partitions to act as carriers of messages. It uses a novel carrier select algorithm to select carrier nodes in the source partition.