Extensible Middleware for Application Development on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Developers of applications for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) face many major problems due to their inconsistencies. Due to the lack of prede ned infrastructure, handling of ad-hoc routing in MANETs has become a major hurdle for developers. In MANETs, nodes can move freely in and out of the network resulting in a highly volatile network topology. Since di erent devices have their own speci cations and communication devices, applications have to adapt to the environment of each device to transmit data. To overcome these complexities in mobile ad-hoc routing, number of middleware have emerged to handle the tedious routing-tasks. Such middleware may provide intuitive high level communication paradigms for the use of application. However, a problem arises when an application needs ne adjustments in its network communication. If the application relies solely on the routing capabilities of a middleware, ne tuning is restricted to the extent of con guration provided by the middleware. Such limitations would be unacceptable to applications which need full network awareness in view of meeting certain performance criteria or requiring of special routing logic. This project presents design and implementation of a middleware, which is less abstract than the existing middleware, but also providing intuitive and reusable communication paradigms for ad-hoc network programming while maintaining network access and a higher level of exibility. It achieves this objective with the use of reusable entities called Communicators that are capable of primitive point to point communication. Communicators represent various communication devices available on hosts. They follow a generic addressing model to unify addressing di erences that exist on those communication devices. The proposed middleware also provides intuitive higher level components which provides higher level communication abstractions. Custom Communicators and high level components can be developed and plugged into this type of middleware. The task of the application in question is to use suitable components and Communicators to implement their own communication logic. In essence, the proposed middleware is an option that helps an application to build its own routing logic by providing intuitive ways to gather information in a diverse environment and take necessary actions depending on the prevailing situation. It never forces anyone to remain faithful to this convention, on the contrary, it always honours the fact that the implemention of routing logic should be entirely left to the application.