A scalable geographic service provision framework for mobile ad hoc networks

Supporting scalable and efficient routing and service provision in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) has been a big research challenge. Conventional topology-based unicast and multicast protocols are normally hard to scale due to the big overhead in their routing schemes. Supported by these routing protocols, conventional service discovery schemes also have limited scalability and efficiency. Basing their forwarding decisions only on the local topology, geographic-based unicast routing protocols have drawn a lot of attentions in recent years. However, current geographic unicast routing can not adapt to different traffic conditions in a service provision network and current geographic multicast protocols can hardly scale to a large network size and group size. We propose a geographic routing and service provision framework for MANET which possesses the features of scalability, efficiency, robustness and adaptability. In the framework, an efficient hierarchical structure is built and maintained, based on which a scalable membership management is deployed to efficiently track the resource and service states. An adaptive and reactive geographic unicast routing protocol and a scalable and robust multicast protocol are designed to meet the different routing requirements in a service provision network. With the support of all of these components, the service provision functions, such as service discovery, delivery and coordination, can be deployed in the framework.