Mobile Ad-hoc Network Management in the Cloud

One benefit of creating a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is that members with no direct access to the Internet can avail themselves of peers' connections to the Internet and use public cloud services. Guaranteed access to cloud services is important in the case of emergency or disaster recovery situations. As managing a MANET is a difficult task, this paper introduces a new model for MANET management that uses cloud services. While preserving the ad-hoc nature of a mobile network, its management by the cloud provides reliability and robustness. The design and implementation of the system are presented, as well as a method for allowing ad-hoc network creation on Android devices. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed prototype, an Android application was designed and tested. It offers communication with the cloud and supports file sharing among peers.