A Generic Background Dissemination Service for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a basic middleware service intended to be used as a generic background dissemination service for distributed self-organizing applications and protocol services in mobile ad-hoc networks. The basic idea is the combination of a device discovery service needed in ad-hoc networks and a dissemination service based on epidemic message distribution. This service is intended to be used by different competing applications and protocols for permanent information dissemination, while consuming only a small fraction of the available limited network bandwidth in a mobile environment. A prototype of this service is implemented and studied in a simulation environment. The paper concludes that information dissemination based on a background dissemination service is attractive if time constraints for the information distribution are low.