A Novel Overlay-Based Failure Detection Architecture for MANET Applications

Abstract-Node failures and message losses are frequent in MANETs. This paper proposes a novel overlay-based architecture for MANET applications to ensure that if a node fails, all the other nodes will be notified. Nodes form a self-organizing overlay network that is overlayed on the physical network. In an overlay network, a set of nodes, called detectors, periodically sense each other's heartbeat messages. Every detector also senses the heartbeat messages of a set of nodes. If a detector does not hear from a node after a timeout (possibly due to node failure or message loss), it identifies the failure of the node according to a set of failure detection rules and then reports the failure to all the other nodes. A simulation is done to demonstrate scalability and to compute the number of non-failed nodes declared as failed. Finally, we describe a use case for recovery in a conferencing situation in MANETs.