A self-organizing group management middleware for mobile ad-hoc networks

The growing proliferation of portable devices, along with the recent advances in Mobile Ad-Hoc NETworks (MANETs) technology open a new technology scenario where users require to collaborate together with their neighbors any-where, at any-time, and without the need of a priori planned communication infrastructure. However, the highly dynamic nature characterizing MANETs, the impossibility of manual or centralized configuration of these environments, along with the heterogeneous capabilities of user devices complicate much collaboration management and call for the investigation of novel solutions with self-organization properties. Groups and superpeer-based Peer-to-Peer (P2P) models and architectures seem particularly well suited for supporting collaboration in MANETs. The paper proposes CAMPE, a self-organizing group management solution, able to compose logical groups of peers with similar interests and goals, to partition groups in different management domains, and to assign differentiated management roles to available peers according to trade-off solutions between a multiplicity of possibly inconsistent and contrasting management criteria, e.g., peer proximity and mobility patterns. In particular, the CAMPE self-organization support adopts a cooperative game-theoretical approach to collaboration management and bases all management decisions on Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques.