Autonomous Gossiping: A self-organizing epidemic algorithm for selective information dissemination in mobile ad-hoc networks

We introduce autonomous gossiping (A/G), a new genre epidemic algorithm for selective dissemination of information in contrast to previous usage of epidemic algorithms which flood the whole network. A/G is a paradigm which suits well in a mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) environment because it does not require any infrastructure or middleware like multicast tree and (un)subscription maintenance for publish/subscribe, but uses ecological and economic principles in a self-organizing manner in order to achieve its selectivity. The trade-off of using an infrastructure-less self-organizing mechanism like A/G is that it does not guarantee completeness deterministically as is one of the original objectives of alternate selective dissemination schemes like publish/subscribe. We argue that such incompleteness is not a problem in many non-critical real-life civilian application scenarios and realistic node mobility patterns, where the overhead of infrastructure maintenance may outweigh the benefits of completeness, more over, at present there exists no mechanism to realize publish/subscribe or other paradigms for selective dissemination in MANET environments. A/G's reliance and hence vulnerability on cooperation of mobile nodes is also much less as compared to other possible schemes using routing information, since it does not expect node philanthropy for forwarding/carrying information, but only cooperation to the extent that nodes already carrying the information pass it on to other suitable ones. Thus autonomous gossiping is expected to be a light-weight infrastructure-less information dissemination service for MANETs, and hence support any-to-many communication (flexible casting) without the need to establish and maintain separate routing information (e.g., multicast trees).