SocialMANET: A Publish/Subscribe Events Dissemination Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

The popularization of mobile equipment capable of communicating autonomously nowadays offers the possibility of thinking more seriously about a mode of communication in which stakeholders communicate in an ad-hoc manner and use mobility to convey information. However, due to their mobile nature, such equipments are limited by their low energy and storage capacity. Algorithms designed for them must therefore be able to deal with these limitations. In this paper, we present SocialMANET, a distributed publish/subscribe events dissemination protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. It implements the hierarchical subjects subscription model which, in addition to allowing to formulate refined subscriptions requests close to the content-based subscription model, also permits to minimize the number of subscriptions required to receive events in several topics: to this end, we have proposed a strategy for generating subject identifiers based on the dynamic level numbering technique. Through the use of a dedicated message format that we have defined, SocialMANET minimizes the number of exchanges required between terminals during (fugitive) contacts to detect and respond to their needs by making the best use of the information extracted from these exchanges. This message format, coupled with the concept of lazily altruistic nodes that we propose, allows SocialMANET to guarantee a high rate of events receipt, even in situations where the interests of the network nodes tend to diverge: the results of the simulations conducted show that, compared to other dissemination protocols of the literature, SocialMANET guarantees a better rate of receiving event while minimizing the power consumption of network nodes. We also present in this paper an application prototype for the dissemination of academic informations within a community of students; it’s based on an implementation of SocialMANET.