Diagnosing mobile ad-hoc networks: two distributed comparison-based self-diagnosis protocols

Abstract

In emergency/rescue applications mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) play an important role as a self-organizable and rapidly deployable infrastructure. Consequently, reliable break MANETs are necessary for this type of applications. One of the key problem we are considering in this paper is the identification of faulty mobile hosts in MANETs. Current distributed diagnosis protocols assume either that the network topology is fixed or impose some restrictions on the mobility of the hosts. In this paper, we first develop an adaptive distributed self-diagnosis protocol, called Adaptive-DSDP, that identifies all faulty mobiles in a diagnosable fixed-topology MANET. Then, we introduce a second self-diagnosis protocol, called Mobile-DSDP, using a comparison-based diagnostic model devised especially for mobile environments. In the comparison approach, each mobile host transmits a test task to its neighbors and the outcomes are compared. The identification of faulty mobiles is based on the matching and mismatching results among the mobiles. The evaluation of the communication and time complexities of Mobile-DSDP shows that efficient self-diagnosis protocols based on the comparison diagnosis model can be designed.