When striving for reliability, multicast protocols are most commonly designed as deterministic solutions. Such an approach seems to make the reasoning about reliability guarantees (traditionally binary "all-or-nothing"- like) in the face of packet losses and/or node crashes. It is however precisely this determinism that tends to become a limiting factor when aiming at both reliability and scalability, particularly in highly dynamic networks, e.g., ad hoc networks. Gossip-based multicast protocols appear to be a viable path towards providing multicast reliability guarantees. Such protocols embrace the non-deterministic nature of ad hoc networks, providing analytically predictable probabilistic reliability guarantees at a reasonable overhead. This paper presents the Route Driven Gossip (RDG) protocol, a gossip-based multicast protocol designed precisely to meet a more practical specification of probabilistic reliability in ad hoc networks. Our RDG protoool can be deployed on any basic on-demand routing protocol, achieving a high level of reliability without relying on any inherent multicast primitive. We illustrate our RDG protocol by layering it on top of the i°barei± DSR protocol, and convey our claims of reliability and scalability through both analysis and simulation.
['Jun Luo', 'Patrick Eugster', 'Jean-Pierre Hubaux']
Probabilistic Reliable Multicast in Ad Hoc Networks