Abstract

In order for pervasive computing to realize its full potential, pervasive applications have to be able to operate without support from fixed communication infrastructure at least some of the time. Sophisticated applications emerging in this domain will have to rely on the cooperation of groups of wireless devices to accomplish their task. A number of such applications are likely to require coordination between devices. Such coordination requires deterministic guarantees from the communication protocol in order to be efficient. In this paper we present a novel many-to-many communication protocol which provides deterministic guarantees, and describe how this protocol can be extended to solve the more fundamental agreement problem\cite{fischer83consensus} in a manner suitable to ad-hoc pervasive environments. Our approach differs from previously proposed deterministic protocols in that it does not rely on routing structures. This allows the protocol to provide its guarantees under a wide range of network conditions and in an efficient manner. Extensive simulations confirm these design objectives.

Keywords

Reliable Manycast, Ad-hoc Networks, Consensus