Enabling reliable many-to-many communication in ad-hoc pervasive environments

In order for pervasive computing to realize its full potential, pervasive applications have to be able to operate without support from fixed communication infrastructure at least some of the time. Sophisticated applications emerging in this domain will have to rely on the cooperation of groups of wireless devices in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion to accomplish their task. A number of such applications are likely to require coordination between devices. Such coordination requires deterministic reliability guarantees from the communication protocol in order to be efficient. In this paper we present a novel P2P many-to-many communication protocol which provides such deterministic guarantees. Our approach differs radically from previously proposed deterministic protocols in that it does not rely on routing structures. This allows the protocol to provide its guarantees under a wide range of network conditions and in an efficient manner.