A stability criteria membership protocol for ad hoc networks

Abstract

Consensus is one of the most common problems in distributed systems. An important example of this in the field of dependability is group membership. However, consensus presents certain impossibilities which are not solvable on asynchronous systems. Therefore, in the case of group membership, systems must rely on additional services to solve the constraints imposed on them by the impossibility of consensus. Such additional services exist in the form of failure detectors and membership estimators. The contribution of this paper is the upper-level algorithm of a protocol stack that provides group membership for dynamic, mobile and partitionable systems, mainly aimed at mobile ad hoc networks. Stability criteria are established to select a subset of nodes with low failure probability to form stable groups of nodes. We provide a description of the algorithm and the results of performance experiments on the NS2 network simulator. © Springer-Verlag 2009.