Exploiting content centric networking to develop topic-based, publish–subscribe MANET systems

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) connect mobile wireless devices without an underlying communication infrastructure. Communications occur in a multi-hop fashion, using mobile devices as routers. Several MANET distributed applications require to exchange data (GPS position, messages, pictures, etc.) by using a topic-based publish–subscribe interaction. Participants of these applications can publish information items on a given topic (identified by a name) and can subscribe to a topic to receive the related published information. An efficient dissemination of publish–subscribe data in MANET environments demands for robust systems, able to face radio resource scarcity, network partitioning, frequent topology changes. Many MANET publish–subscribe systems have been proposed so far in the literature assuming an underlying TCP/IP network.In this paper, we discuss the benefits of building a MANET publish–subscribe system exploiting Content Centric Networking (CCN) technology, rather than TCP/IP. We show how CCN functionality, such as in-network caching and multicasting can be used to achieve an efficient and reliable data dissemination in MANET environments, including the support of delay tolerant delivery. We present different design approaches, describe our topic-based publish–subscribe CCN system, and report the results of a performance evaluation study carried out with real software in an emulated environment. The emulation environment is based on Linux virtual machines. The performance evaluation required also a CCN MANET routing engine, which we developed as a plug-in of the OLSR Linux daemon.