HiCo-MoG: Hierarchical consensus-based group membership service in mobile Ad Hoc networks

Group Communication System (GCS) is largely recognized as fundamental support in fault tolerance solutions. The need for such a system arises not only in wired networks but also in mobile Ad-Hoc networks. The design of this service becomes more complex in these networks because of their very dynamic topology and limited energy autonomy. Group Membership service is considered as a significant part of the GCS. In this paper, we propose HiCo-MoG (Hierarchical Consensus for Mobile Group): an efficient solution for group membership in large mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET). While the group membership problem is also equivalent to Consensus, we use the Dynamic Hierarchical Consensus called (HCD) with dynamic clusterheads set for designing a group membership service for MANETs. The HCD protocol achieves consensus using the clusters provided by a new failure detector called C. Each group member can obtain a consistent view of the group by executing the consensus protocol. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method in term of scalability and fault tolerance.