REDMAN: a decentralized middleware solution for cooperative replication in dense MANETs

The mass market of wireless devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as university campuses, airports and shopping malls, where many mobile wireless peers autonomously cooperate, without the need of statically deployed support infrastructures. Dense MANETs can take advantage of high node population to replicate resources of common interest to increase their availability overcoming unpredictable node movements. The paper proposes a lightweight application-level middleware, called REDMAN, to manage, retrieve and disseminate replicas of data and service components transparently from the point of view of service developers, thus facilitating the realization of scalable distributed applications for dense MANETs. REDMAN proposes novel lightweight solutions, specific for and effective in dense MANETs, to determine dense region boundaries, to perform resource cloning/distribution/retrieval, and to approximately maintain the desired resource replication degree.