A protocol for partitionable group membership service in mobile Internet

The explosive growth of mobile and wireless communications has attracted interests in the integration of mobile and wireless networks with wired ones and the wired Internet in particular. Such an integrated mobile Internet environment has brought up many new applications and there is an increasing demand for enhanced services to help users do mobile collaborations, which requires the support for mobile group communications. In this paper, based on a multitier proxy-based mobile Internet architecture, we propose a novel scalable, reliable, and partitionable membership protocol for mobile group communications. The proxies manage local groups of mobile users and are dynamically organized into a ring-based hierarchy for global membership management. We describe algorithms and mechanisms for membership propagation and topology maintenance in the presence of dynamic membership, dynamic locations of mobile hosts, and dynamic networks. The proposed protocol can tolerate proxy failures, and network failures including network partitions and network merges. Theoretical analysis and simulation studies show that, comparing with existing tree-based protocols, the proposed protocol has comparable scalability and higher reliability. Copyright (C) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.