Immortal Under the Edge of a Knife: Self-Healing Distributed Services on MANET Partitioning

Wireless and mobile ad hoc networks will consolidate future network architectures. Due to limited resources and the high churn of nodes, these networks are prone to network partitioning. So far, other work has considered this problem exclusively on the connectivity level by restoring connections by repositioning nodes. However, the application level perspective is missing, although distributed services, like network services, can be built to be robust against random failures. In this work, we examine how distributed storage can adapt its redundancy at the application layer to counteract the repercussions of network partitioning. Adjusting redundancy to present situations is necessary to deal with the dynamic topology in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). Consequently, in this work, we propose a formal model for network partitioning from the application point of view. We propose two schemes to add and remove redundancy, to create a self-healing network and compare them to the state-of-the-art concepts. Furthermore, we show the cost of service availability facing partitioning and the disconnection of individual participants. With our proposed schemes, we were able to reduce the storage cost by 80% to ensure the same level of availability as by using state-of-the-art techniques.