Balancing the Trade-Offs between Query Delay and Data Availability in MANETs

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), nodes move freely and link/node failures are common, which leads to frequent network partitions. When a network partition occurs, mobile nodes in one partition are not able to access data hosted by nodes in other partitions, and hence significantly degrade the performance of data access. To deal with this problem, we apply data replication techniques. Existing data replication solutions in both wired or wireless networks aim at either reducing the query delay or improving the data availability, but not both. As both metrics are important for mobile nodes, we propose schemes to balance the trade-offs between data availability and query delay under different system settings and requirements. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed schemes can achieve a balance between these two metrics and provide satisfying system performance.