Abstract
In this paper we present a protocol for reliable multicast within a group of mobile hosts that communicate with a wired infrastructure by means of wireless technology. The protocol assumes that the wireless coverage may be incomplete and message losses could occur even within cells, due to physical obstructions or to the high error rate of the wireless technology, for example. A novel feature of our proposal is that it tolerates failures in the wired infrastructure, i.e., crashes of stationary hosts and partitions of wired links. In particular, upon such failures mobile hosts simply observe that the covered area has shrunk. The covered area will enlarge back to its original extension when the failure recovers. We evaluate our protocol by means of an extensive simulation analysis. The main findings of our analysis are: the protocol exhibits very good scalability properties; the performance degradation induced by fault-tolerance is moderate.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
A. Acharya and B.R. Badrinath, A framework for delivering multicast messages in networks with mobile hosts, ACM/Baltzer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications 1(2) (1996) 199–219.
S. Alagar, R. Rajagoplan and S. Venkatesan, Tolerating mobile support station failures, in: Proc. of the First Conference on Fault Tolerant Systems, Madras, India (December 1995) pp. 225–231. Also available as Technical Report of the University of Texas at Dallas.
S. Alagar and S. Venkatesan, Causal ordering in distributed mobile systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers 46(3) (1997) 353–361.
G. Anastasi and A. Bartoli, On the structuring of reliable multicast protocols for mobile wireless computing, The Computer Journal 46(2) (2003).
G. Anastasi, A. Bartoli and F. Luccio, Fault-tolerant support for reliable multicast in mobile wireless systems, in: Proc. IFIP TC-6 Networking Conference, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2345 (Springer, May 2002) pp. 1069–1080.
G. Anastasi, A. Bartoli and F.L. Luccio, Fault-tolerant support for reliable muliticast in mobile wireless systems: Design and evaluation, Technical Report Quaderni Matematici 526, Università di Trieste (July 2002). Available at http://mathsun1.univ.trieste.it/~luccio/tecrepmob.ps.gz
G. Anastasi, A. Bartoli and F. Spadoni, A reliable multicast protocol for distributed mobile systems: Design and evaluation, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 12(10) (2001) 1009–1022.
V. Aravamudhan, K. Ratnam and S. Rangajaran, An efficient multicast protocol for PCS networks, ACM/Baltzer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications 2(4) (1997) 333–344.
A. Bartoli, Group-based multicast and dynamic membership in wireless networks with incomplete spatial coverage, ACM/Baltzer Journal on Mobile Networks and Applications 3(2) (1998) 175–188.
K. Birman, The process group approach to reliable distributed computing, Communications of the ACM 36(12) (1993) 37–53.
K. Brown and S. Singh, Relm: Reliable multicast for mobile networks, Computer Communications 21(16) (1998) 1379–1400.
R.K. Budhia, Performance engineering of group communication protocols, Technical Report, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (August 1997). Ph.D. dissertation.
R. Caceres and V. Padmanabhan, Fast and scalable wireless handoffs in support of mobile internet audio, ACM/Baltzer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications 3(4) (1998) 351–363.
V. Chikarmane, C. Williamson, R. Bunt and W. Mackrell, Multicast support for mobile hosts using mobile IP: Design issues and proposed architecture, ACM/Baltzer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications 3(4) (1998) 365–379.
K. Cho and K.P. Birman, A group communication approach to mobile computing, Technical Report CS TR94-1424, Cornell University (May 1994).
F. Kaashoek and A. Tanenbaum, An evaluation of the amoeba group communication system, in: Proc. 16th IEEE International Conference of Distributed Computing Systems (May 1996) pp. 436–447.
D. Pradhan, P. Krishna and N. Vaidya, Recovery in mobile environments: Design and trade-off analysis, in: 26th International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS-26) (June 1996). Also available as Technical Report of the Texas A&M University.
R. Prakash, M. Raynal and M. Singhal, An adaptive causal ordering algorithm suited to mobile computing environment, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 41(2) (1997) 190–204.
R. Prakash and M. Singhal, Low-cost checkpointing and failure recovery in mobile computing systems, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 7(10) (1996) 1035–1048.
C. Williamson, T. Harrison, W. Mackrell and R. Bunt, Performance evaluation of the mom mobile multicast protocol, ACM/Baltzer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications 3 (1998) 189–201.
G. Xylomenos and G. Polyzos, IP multicast for mobile hosts, IEEE Communications Magazine 35(1) (1997) 54–58.
L. Yen, T. Huang and S. Hwang, A protocol for causally ordered message delivery in mobile computing systems, ACM/Baltzer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications 2(4) (1997) 365–372.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Anastasi, G., Bartoli, A. & Luccio, F.L. Fault-Tolerant Support for Reliable Multicast in Mobile Wireless Systems: Design and Evaluation. Wireless Networks 10, 259–269 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:WINE.0000023860.73046.94
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:WINE.0000023860.73046.94