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A Stability Criteria Membership Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks*
Juan Carlos García, Stefan Beyer, and Pablo Galdámez
Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia,46022 Valencia, Spainjuagaror@iti.upv.es
stefan@iti.upv.es
pgaldam@iti.upv.es
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.
Keywords: ad hoc networks, distributed systems, consensus, group membership, stability criteria
*This work has been partially supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MEC under grant TIN2006-14738-C02-01 and by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under grant TIN2009-14460-C03.
LNCS 5870, p. 690 ff.
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009