Controlled Epidemic-Style Dissemination Middleware for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Traditional middleware primitives offer very elementary information dissemination mechanisms, which in the case of a decentralized and dynamic network such as a mobile ad hoc network, do not offer the ability to control the information spreading. Control over information dissemination could instead be very critical especially in terms of lifetime of the network. Gossip-based communication and epidemic-style algorithms, which are based on a store and forward approach, have been proposed to obtain message dissemination with probabilistic guarantees and lower overheads. However, epidemic algorithms have never been used to allow designers to control the spreading of the information depending on the desired reliability and the network structure. In this paper, we present a middleware for ad hoc networking, which uses epidemic-style information dissemination techniques to tune the reliability of the communication in mobile ad hoc networks. The approach is based on recent results of complex networks theory; the novelty of our idea resides in the evaluation and the exploitation of the structure of the underlying network for the automatic tuning of the dissemination process and its use in the design of the API offered by the middleware. We present a detailed analytical model supported by several simulation results