Delivering Messages

in Disconnected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ritesh Shah and Norman C. Hutchinson

Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia

{rshah,norm}@cs.ubc.ca

Abstract. Many routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have

been developed. These protocols find a route to a destination if such a
route exists. We present a novel protocol that delivers messages between
disconnected hosts, that is, when no route exists between them. Our
protocol uses the nodes moving between the neighbourhoods of the source
and destination nodes to act as carriers of the messages. We describe the
protocol in detail, provide an initial simulation-based evaluation of its
performance compared to both a naive scheme and the optimal scheme,
and discuss some extensions to the protocol that we are exploring.

1 Introduction
An ad-hoc network is a self-starting network formed on-the-fly by a group of
mobile nodes without the aid of any centralized administration or established
infrastructure. Ad-Hoc networks find their use in situations where no fixed wired
infrastructure is available or has been damaged by natural or man-made disaster.
Rapid advancement in wireless technology and increasingly affordable prices
of wireless devices have made ad-hoc networks a reality. This has fuelled a lot of
research activity in the field. Several protocols [1], [5], [6] have been developed to
find and maintain routes between the nodes of an ad-hoc network. These routing
protocols can be divided into three broad categories. First are the pro-active
protocols, that use periodic advertisements to broadcast routing information,
such as DSDV [2]. Second are on-demand protocols, that search for routes on-
demand, such as AODV [4] and DSR [3]. Third are those routing protocols that
use a hybrid approach, which is a combination of the first two approaches. While
each approach has its advantages and disadvantages in finding a route between
two mobile hosts when one exists, none of them handle the case of message
delivery between two disconnected hosts.
Links in a MANET (Mobile Ad-Hoc Network) are susceptible to frequent
breakage due to movement of nodes. This may cause some nodes to get discon-
nected from others. A message destined to such a disconnected node results in
a delivery failure irrespective of the routing protocol used. Different protocols
handle this situation differently but at most they invalidate the route, if there
was one already in use and inform the source about the situation.
Why is the question of message delivery among disconnected hosts impor-
tant? Consider a disaster relief scenario. Relief workers are working on several

S. Pierre, M. Barbeau, and E. Kranakis (Eds.): ADHOC-NOW 2003, LNCS 2865, pp. 72–83, 2003.


c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003
 Delivering Messages in Disconnected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks 73

sites scattered in an area. The workers have mobile nodes to communicate among
themselves. The sites may be separated by a distance that is several times the
radio range of the devices. In such a case some of the sites might be discon-
nected from each other, forming multiple partitioned mobile ad-hoc networks in
the area. While sporadic node movements between the sites may offer connec-
tivity, it may be for brief periods of time. In such a situation it would be helpful
to have some mechanism of delivering messages between disconnected hosts.
Consider a similar scenario on a long beach having several scenic-spots sep-
arated from each other by a distance several times the radio range. While there
are nodes moving between the them, the scenic-spots may be disconnected for
the majority of the time. It is easy to see that the nodes moving between these
disconnected networks could be used as carriers of messages for other nodes.
Now the question is how to select the right carrier node. One option is to
select all the nodes in the connected graph containing the source as carrier nodes.
This could create unnecessary replication of messages and wastage of network
bandwidth. So the goal is to find the right carrier node — the one that will come
in contact with the destination within a certain period of time in the future. It is
impossible for a source to choose the right carrier node without the knowledge of
the present and future trajectories of all nodes. So a more refined goal could be to
select those nodes as carrier nodes that have a higher probability of connecting
to the destination in the future. Even this is difficult to ascertain without the
knowledge of position and direction of movement of the disconnected destination
and potential carrier nodes. A further refined goal could be to select carrier nodes
in every direction (as the position and direction of movement of the disconnected
destination is not known) and to minimize redundancy in doing so. In this paper
we propose a completely decentralized protocol, Voilà, that replicates a message
destined for a host disconnected from the source on selective nodes.

2 Routing Protocol
Our protocol will work with any proactive or on-demand routing protocol includ-
ing DSDV, AODV and DSR. Besides routing messages, the only requirement that
our algorithm places on the routing protocol is that it is capable of maintaining
a neighbour list at each node. We assume that the routing protocol reports with
an upcall to our protocol whenever a route to a destination cannot be found or
is broken.

3 Algorithm
The algorithm is described from the points of view of each of the nodes that
participate in it. The intuition behind this algorithm is that mobile nodes tend
to exhibit correlated movement patterns. This correlated movement of nodes or
”group mobility” has been studied in the past and several group based mobility
models [9], [11] have been proposed. Based on this we propose that nodes that
are close to each other need not store the same message, only one of them should
be chosen to hold a message.