Reliable Group Communication for Dynamic and Resource-Constrained Environments

In the field of embedded systems there is a tendency towards distributed mobile environments relying on wireless networking. These inherently dynamic environments present new challenges for system reliability. One basic building block for reliability support at the software level is reliable group communication. However, traditional implementations of such a service are unsuitable for wireless and embedded environments, in which bandwidth and power consumption limitations exist. In this paper we present a group communication service optimized for mobile ad-hoc networks which provides reliable communication for a subset of stable nodes. These stable nodes can then use reliable communication to implement higher-level reliability services such as replication.