Machine learning in disruption-tolerant MANETs

Abstract

In this article we study the data dissemination problem in which data items are flooded to all the moving objects in a mobile ad hoc network by peer-to-peer transfer. We show that if memory and bandwidth are bounded at moving objects, then the problem of determining whether a set of data items can be disseminated to all the moving objects is NP-complete. For a heuristic solution we postulate that a moving object should save and transmit the data items that are most likely to be new (i.e., previously unknown) to future encountered moving objects. We propose a method to be used by each moving object to prioritize data items based on their probabilities of being new to future receivers. The method employs a machine learning system for estimation of the novelty probability and the machine learning system is progressively trained by received data items. Through simulations based on real mobility traces, we show the superiority of the method against some natural alternatives. © 2009 ACM.