Mobi-G: Gossip-based monitoring in MANETs

Monitoring in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) constitutes a crucial service, as it enables the adaptation to the changing conditions in those networks based on the monitored state. Many monitoring mechanisms rely on a hierarchical structure, which must be maintained and suffers from sparsely populated networks, where the hierarchy might not be correctly established. Contrary to this structured design, other mechanisms rely on a simple, flat topology using gossiping to aggregate information. However, current gossip-based approaches provide inaccurate results, since they cannot handle the characteristics of MANETs. To overcome these problems and to exploit the flat topology and the robust communication pattern of gossiping for the monitoring of MANETs, this paper introduces Mobi-G. Mobi- G is a flat approach that gossips to exchange information instead of gossiping to aggregate them. It consists of a flexible protocol that exploits the characteristics of wireless communication, handles the mobility of nodes, and operates even in sparsely populated networks to provide accurate results at minimum cost.