Distributed Allocation of Identical Resources in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper addresses the l—Exclusion problem for mobile ad hoc networks. The l—Exclusion problem, a generalization of distributed mutual exclusion problem, involves a group of processes, each of which intermittently requires access to one of l identical resources or pieces of code called the critical section (CS). In literature, few token—based solutions to this l—Exclusion problem are available. Nevertheless, these solutions suffer from poor failure resiliency, as these do not consider failures associated with mobile ad hoc networks, such as loss or regeneration of tokens, crash or sudden recovery of nodes. This paper presents a consensus—based mobility—aware l—exclusion (LE) algorithm that operates asynchronously and copes explicitly with arbitrary (possibly concurrent) topology changes associated with such networks. The algorithm can tolerate link changes or failures, sudden crashes or recoveries of at most l—1 mobile nodes. The algorithm is based on collection enough consensuses for a mobile node intending to enter CS, and uses diffusing computations for this purpose. The algorithm requires nodes to communicate only with their current neighbors, making it well—suited for use in mobile ad hoc networks. This paper presents a simulation study to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm, as compared to the k—Reverse Link (KRL) algorithm, is quite effective to variety of operating conditions, and is highly adaptive to frequent and unpredictable topology changes due to link changes or failures or formations, sudden crashes or recoveries of at most l—1 mobile nodes, under different mobility settings.