REDMAN: An optimistic replication middleware for read-only resources in dense MANETs

The spread of wireless portable devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as shopping malls and airports, where a high number of mobile peers can autonomously cooperate without a statically deployed network infrastructure. The paper proposes the REDMAN middleware to manage, retrieve, and disseminate replicas of data/service components to cooperating nodes in a dense MANET. The guideline is to exploit high node population to enable optimistic lightweight resource replication capable of tolerating node exits/failures. REDMAN adopts original approximated solutions, specifically designed for dense MANET, that have demonstrated good scalability and limited overhead for dense MANET configuration (node identification and manager election), for replica distribution/retrieval, and for lazily consistent replica degree maintenance.