Group Communication Applications for MANETs: Requirements and Real Implementations

Desinging, developing and testing real applications for ad hoc network environments still deserves particular attention by the MANET research community. We believe that they represent a great incentive for mobile users to adopt the MANET technology in the daily life. From this standpoint, Group- Communication Applications are a very interesting class. In the chapter we motivate this claim by presenting examples of Group-Communication Applications that leverage exclusive features of ad hoc networks. Being run on completely on-demand networks they can be particularly valuable to end users. We then provide an overview of the main issues that should be addressed for such applications to be deployed in practice. As a case study, we present our prototype implementation of a Whiteboard Application. The prototype includes the networking support required by the Whiteboad, and thus can be used to test it in a real testbed. We present outcomes of a rich set of experiments in which we compare the performance achieved when alternative P2P systems are adopted in the network support. Results, highlight that designing network protocols (and P2P systems in particular) that exploit the cross-layer argument is of paramount importance to make Group-Communication Application feasible for real.