Using Data Replication for Improving QoS in MANETs

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a set of mobile wireless devices, which communicate by forwarding packets for each other. These autonomous devices act as routers and as end nodes as well. The communication from one node to another can happen in many routes with different number of hops. Because of mobility these routes change dynamically. Recent application of MANETs have strong Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Mobility and limited resources in MANET makes difficult to guarantee the QoS. In this work, we propose a framework, which improves the QoS of MANETs via data replication. We also aim to support critical requirement applications based on MANETs such as disaster management scenarios in which data retrieval is a critical requirement to support real time decision making. We discuss several replication techniques to optimize the number of hops needed to retrieve data in MANETs. Such techniques comprise probabilistic, fuzzy logic and optimization techniques to achieve an intelligent distribution of replicas at MANETs nodes.