Direct transmission vs relay transmission for information dissemination in a MANet: an analytical study

It is acknowledged that in a mobile environment the wireless technologies that are available at each node can be exploited so as to achieve efficient peer-to-peer communications. Therefore we have developed a multilevel platform the goal of which is to allow a set of mobile terminals to securely communicate in a peer-to-peer manner by using the most appropriate available technology according to the context at hand. The scenario that we have chosen to focus on targets information sharing for collaboration purpose between the mobile nodes of the network. The study of this scenario led us to identify the main operations that are required to achieve it, the central process being the publication of profiles. This operation is meant to allow a node to publish a description (that we call a profile) of the information it is willing to share with the other nodes. Two approaches, direct transmission and relay transmission, are considered so that the publication of profiles can be performed in the most efficient way (according to the available communication technologies and the dynamics of the network). In this paper, we first present the target environments that we consider and the approach that we have chosen to implement in our multilevel platform. We then focus on the publication of profiles and we highlight the two transmission modes (direct transmission and relay transmission) that we have chosen to consider. We analytically study and compare them in terms of the probability to successfully deliver a given message in the target context defined above. We conclude with future research directions.