Controlled Epidemic-style Data Dissemination in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Traditional routing mechanisms for mobile ad hoc networks fail when disconnection is frequent and when the network gets temporarily partitioned. The alternative approach for message delivery is flooding, which, however, comes with large transmission overheads. Gossip-based communication and epidemic-style routing algorithms have been proposed to achieve scalability in distributed systems and to support probabilistic communication when the application of the classic deterministic algorithms and protocols is impossible or unsuitable. In this paper, we apply epidemic-style information dissemination techniques to tune the reliability of the communication in mobile ad hoc networks. The approach is based on recent results of complex networks theory; the main novelty of our idea resides in the evaluation and the exploitation of the structure of the underlying network for the automatic tuning of the dissemination process. We present a detailed analytical model supported by several simulation results.