An agile approach to distributed information dissemination in mobile ad hoc networks

In order to ease the challenging task of information dissemination in a MANET, we employ a legend: a data structure passed around a network to share information with all the mobile nodes. Our motivating application of the legend is sharing location information. Previous research shows that a simplistic legend performs better than other location services. To realize the full potential of legend-based location services, we propose three methods for the legend to traverse a network and compare their performance in simulation. We also evaluate several improvements to the traversal methods, and describe our way of making the legend transmission reliable. The result is a simple, lightweight location service that makes efficient use of network resources.