Structure-less content-based routing in mobile ad hoc networks

The decoupling and asynchrony properties of the content-based publish-subscribe paradigm makes it very appealing for dynamic wireless networks, like those that often occur in pervasive computing scenarios. Unfortunately, none of the currently available content-based publish-subscribe middleware fit the requirements of such extreme scenarios in which the network is subject to very frequent topological reconfigurations due to the mobility of nodes. In this paper we propose a protocol for content-based message dissemination tailored to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with frequent topological changes. Message routing occurs without the support of any network-wide dispatching infrastructure thus eliminating the issue of maintaining such logical topology on top of a time varying physical topology. The paper reports an extensive simulation study, which provides numerical evidence of the effectiveness of the approach.