Architecture for group communication in mobile systems

In mobile computing systems the network configuration changes due to node mobility. The paper identifies the issues a group communication service has to take into account in order to handle node mobility. These include the need to identify the location of a node, and the ability to cope with inaccuracies in the determination of a group membership. A multi level architecture for group communication in mobile systems is presented. This architecture contains a synchronous proximity layer protocol to determine the set of mobile nodes in the proximity of a given node in the network. This information is used by a three round group membership protocol for construction of groups used by mobile applications. As an example, the architecture is specialized to solve the channel allocation problem.