Abstract

The protocol presented here guarantees that at least a specified number, k, of destinations receive a given message. The guarantees are deterministic and the failure probability is zero. Such a strong delivery assurance provides a more powerful primitive than protocols which attempt to minimise failure probability, and is useful for meeting many user-level requirements. Simulations under a wide range of settings confirm that the overhead is low even k is high, and that the protocol is scalable. These desirable performance results are due to many design features, in particular, the decentralised delivery management whereby any node - manycast initiator or destination- can take responsibility in a cost-effective manner for achieving the specified delivery ratio. The goal of attaining total reliability is comprehensively addressed: the design considers even the rare, but not impossible, scenarios of the network behaving as an adversary.

Keywords

Reliable Manycast, Ad-hoc Networks