REDMAN: Lightweight Replication Middleware for Dense MANETs

The increasing diffusion of wireless-enabled portable devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as shopping malls, railway stations and airports, where a high number of mobile wireless peers autonomously cooperate, without the need for statically deployed network infrastruc-tures. Dense MANET deployment scenarios can take advantage of high node population to replicate the resources of common interest to increase their avail-ability overcoming the unpredictable node en-trance/exit in/from the dense region. The paper proposes a lightweight application-level middleware, called REDMAN, to manage, retrieve and disseminate replicas of data/service components transparently from the point of view of service developers, thus facilitating the realization of wide-scale services. In particular, REDMAN implements novel lightweight solutions to determine the nodes belonging to dense MANET with-out exploiting any positioning system and to dynamically elect a suitable replica manager node in charge of enforcing the desired resource replication degree in a lazy consistent way. Experimental results show that REDMAN solutions are effective in dense MANET sce-narios.