Design and Quantitative Analysis of Protocols for Epidemic Information Dissemination in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This thesis explores the field of protocols for epidemic information dissemination (EID) that constitute a novel way to implement peer-to-peer communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). Such protocols exploit device mobility and transmit information when mobile devices encounter, similar to the spread of an infectious disease among individuals. The contribution of this thesis is three-fold. As first contribution, a general-purpose distributed lookup service for MANET is presented. The lookup service, denoted as Passive Distributed Indexing (PDI), builds upon epidemic dissemination of index information. It differs from previously proposed EID systems in three major aspects: (1) PDI can be employed for key-to-value lookups in arbitrary mobile applications. (2) PDI explicitly considers the limited availability of memory resources on mobile devices by using buffers of finite capacity and employing Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement when the buffer capacity is exceeded. (3) PDI pro...