Endcast: mobile stateless data delivery in MANETs

MANETs are networks of mobile devices for multihop communication without a separate infrastructure for routing and control. If robust protocols are available, MANETs can exploit the true ubiquity of everyday mobile devices for application scenarios such as collaborative learning, multiplayer gaming, adaptive advertising as well as in disaster management and battlefield communication. Traditional schemes such as reactive, proactive and hybrid routing incur costs of often O ( n 2 ) for discovering and maintaining routes or node hierarchies for networks with n number of nodes. These routes or node structures become obsolete rapidly due to MANET dynamics resulting from mobility, limited battery life, and impairments of wireless links. These traditional approaches are based on a paradigm that we refer to as fixed-stateful routing . The routing paradigm that best matches the ubiquity of devices in a MANET is mobile-stateless routing . In mobile-stateless routing, nodes do not keep global network states or play special roles as control nodes. We propose flooding as an end to end packet delivery mechanism and introduce the concept of endcast that allows the communication from a single source to a single destination in which the data is carried by controlled flooding and the data propagation is inhibited after reaching the destination. Problem statement Simple flooding causes excessive packet redundancy resulting in collisions and contention which is known as broadcast storm problem. We introduce the term broadcast flood problem to refer to the propagation of data beyond the destination in flooding operation. This research is aimed at modeling endcast and developing an endcast scheme to enable MANET nodes to perform end to end communication in mobile-stateless manner. Solution We built a theoretical model to analyze the endcast concept. This model includes methods to quantify broadcast storm problem and broadcast flood problem. Based on this model, we proposed an endcast scheme that controls the storm situation using counter-based flooding and the flood situation using negative acknowledgement packets. The storm control scheme is inspired by the chalone mechanism that regulates growth of biological organs. The proposed scheme is in the mobile-stateless routing paradigm because the nodes keep only a set of local states in the form of a log of received data packets and the nodes do not act as infrastructure nodes. We apply the theoretical model on the proposed endcas