P-SEAN: A Framework for Policy-based Server Election in Ad hoc Networks

The client-server model is a commonly used model for distributed application programming. Most of group-collaboration applications, such as network gaming, rely on this model. We call a group-collaboration application an application where any participating entity can centralize the shared information and play the role of server. In wired networks, the choice of the participating entity playing the server role has a limited impact on the performances of the application, the station or the network. However, in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) an inadequate server choice can have a side effect on the network-, the application- or the wireless station-performances. The objective of our current work is to propose a novel and complete framework for server election and maintenance in ad hoc networks. This framework, called P-SEAN for policy-based server election in ad hoc networks, uses two concepts in order to perform the server election process: the serving ability degree and the situational server-election policy. Hence, the proposed framework implements the different situations for server election and maintenance in ad hoc networks as policy-rules (situational server-election policy). This election and maintenance are mainly based on factors such as connectivity, processing power, RAM capacity, remaining battery life, etc. These factors define the serving ability degree of each ad hoc node. The motivation behind using the policy-based networking paradigm is to render our framework extensible to incorporate additional application-specific criteria. In addition to these two main concepts, we also propose a complete architecture for a P-SEAN-enabled service and a lightweight protocol for server election and maintenance exchanges