Mobile Application Development with MELON

Developing distributed applications for mobile ad hoc network continues to be challenging due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of MANETs. MELON is a general purpose coordination language designed to provide flexible communication patterns for MANET applications while remaining lightweight. Based on a distributed shared message store, MELON abstracts network communication to an asynchronous exchange of persistent messages. MELON simplifies application development by supporting read-only and remove-only messages, bulk message retrieval, and per-host ordering of messages. In this paper, we review the MELON programming model, demonstrate its utility for writing MANET applications, and quantitatively compare it to traditional distributed computing paradigms in a MANET context. For a shared whiteboard application, we find MELON achieves 100% message delivery with 95% less latency than tuple spaces while also maintaining per-host message ordering.