Towards an Opportunistic and Location-Aware Service Provision in Disconnected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Opportunistic networking has recently appeared as a promising method to support communication in disconnected mobile ad hoc networks. This new communication model relies on the "store, carry and forward" principle, and exploits ad hoc communication and device mobility in order to achieve a network-wide message dissemination. It allows nomadic people to communicate together without resorting to infrastructure-based networks and to have access to services offered by infostations even if they are not in the area covered by these devices. Nevertheless, to be efficient this model requires to guide the message propagation using contextual information, and especially location information. In this paper, we present the middleware solution we have defined in order to support the provision of location-aware application services in disconnected mobile ad hoc networks using opportunistic communications.