Content routing algorithms to support Publish/Subscribe in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) allow communication between moving nodes without using infrastructure like access points, stationary routers or GPS. This offers new communication opportunities, especially in challenging environments. To communicate in MANETs we often need routing functionality, which usually provides unicast-based best effort packet delivery. Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) is a well known and powerful paradigm that provides higher expressiveness than unicast routing. It decouples senders from receivers and allows information exchange between network nodes that offer certain data (called publishers) and nodes that declare their interest in data of some pattern (called subscribers). Especially in MANET applications, Pub/Sub provides useful functionality to support realistic scenarios and novel applications. This paper proposes a new algorithm called TPSR, tailored to efficiently support Pub/Sub in MANETs. It is based mainly on two principles: i) it uses the dissemination of subscriptions to create source routes; and ii) it uses the signal strength messages are received with, to optimize routes in terms of striking a good balance between long routes and fragile routes. Simulations based on ns-2 demonstrate its performance, in comparison with flooding and unicast-based solutions.