Dandelion: Mobility-assisted Reliable Message Propagation Protocol in MANETs

Reliable message propagation is an important means of communication in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and serves as a fundamental component for various applications, such as mobile advertising, inter-vehicle safety message propagation, alert propagation to defend against cyber-attacks in MANETs. Reliable message propagation requires that a message can be delivered to a large percent (e.g. 90%) of network nodes even under the presence of malicious/selfish nodes and intermittent network partitions. Inspired by the proliferation of dandelion in botanic world, we propose a reliable epidemic routing protocol for message propagation, called Dandelion. The Dandelion protocol relies on node mobility and periodic retransmission of a message. Comparing with flooding-based epidemic routing protocol, our mobility-assisted reliable epidemic routing protocol demonstrates excellent reliability, efficiency, and robustness.