ALCOMFT-TR-01-119

Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Sotiris Nikoletseas, Nearchos Paspallis, Paul Spirakis and Christos Zaroliagis
An Experimental Study of Basic Communication Protocols in Ad-Hoc Mobile Networks
Patras. Work packages 2 and 5. May 2001.

Abstract: We investigate basic communication protocols in ad-hoc mobile networks. We follow the semi-compulsory approach according to which a small part of the mobile users, the support \Sigma, that moves in a predetermined way is used as an intermediate pool for receiving and delivering messages. Under this approach, we present a new semi-compulsory protocol called the runners in which the members of \Sigma perform concurrent and continuous random walks and exchange any information given to them by senders when they meet. We also conduct a comparative experimental study of the runners protocol with another existing semi-compulsory protocol, called the snake, in which the members of \Sigma move in a coordinated way and always remain pairwise adjacent. The experimental evaluation has been carried out in a new generic framework that we developed to implement protocols for mobile computing. Our experiments showed that for both protocols only a small support is required for efficient communication, and that the runners protocol outperforms the snake protocol in almost all types of inputs we considered.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-01-119.ps.gz (208 kb).