Towards a new communication paradigm for mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, we envision a network where mobile users obtain services from close-by instances. The architecture of today's Internet was designed for fixed users that obtain services from stationary servers and is not well suited for such scenarios. The reason is that (i) the architecture combines identity and location in an IP address and thus forces mobile elements to change their identity when moving over subnet boundaries; and that (ii) the layered architecture implies a separation of service discovery/selection and routing, which is inflexible and also leads to protocol overhead. In this paper, we revise the existing Internet architecture and propose a novel architecture that is better suited for mobile ad hoc networks. There, clients bind to location-independent service identifiers and send packets that are routed to any instance of the desired service in proximity. The routing mechanism is based on the concept of (electrical) fields with which packets are forwarded towards a region with a high density of service nodes. As a result, this architecture increases the probability of successful packet delivery and leads to a robust routing substrate even in very unstable network conditions