Message Stability and Reliable Broadcasts in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Many to many reliable broadcast is useful while building distributed services like group membership and agreement in a MANET. Efforts in implementing reliable broadcast optimised for MANETs have resulted in new protocols that reduce the number of transmissions required to achieve reliable broadcast. A practical implementation of reliable broadcasts requires the ability to detect message stability, and there is still a need to develop protocols that efficiently support message stability determination in a MANET. In this paper we describe such a protocol that is independent of the broadcast optimisation being used, and focuses on providing efficient message stability. As the main idea of the protocol, we define a message dependency relationship and use this relationship to implement reliable broadcast as well as message stability detection. Simulations for mobile and static scenarios show our protocol has only a minimal performance degradation with node mobility.