Group Membership Management Protocol In Mobile Internet

Internet technology and wireless technology are converging for mobile Internet computing. With the integration of heterogeneous wired Internet and different kinds of wireless access networks, more and more applications will be deployed in mobile Internet environment in the near future. In recent years, group-based applications, protocols and algorithms have gained in popularity. Based on a thorough investigation on group membership management schemes in the network environment including wired Internet and mobile Internet, a membership propagation algorithm and a topology maintenance algorithm based on the ring-based hierarchy are proposed in this paper.The proposed membership protocol runs in a parallel and distributed way in the sense that each proxy in the hierarchy maintains local information related to its possible neighbors, including leader, previous, next, parent and child proxy. Each proxy in a logical ring independently collects, generates and sends membership change/update messages propagated by the one-round token passing algorithm. Each proxy propagates membership change/update messages along the ring-based hierarchy independently. Finally, membership information is propagated to the leader of the top logical ring in the hierarchy according to the membership propagation algorithm. In this way, the leader of the top logical ring in the hierarchy maintains global group membership of the group. At the same time of propagating membership information and repairing the failures of nodes or network, the topology of the ring-based hierarchy may change accordingly. Therefore, we propose a topology maintenance algorithm to reconstruct the ring-based hierarchy. The topology maintenance algorithm not only deals with the case that the proxies attach to/detach from the hierarchy, but also excludes the faults due to node/network failures in time, and heals the hierarchy thereafter. Extensive theoretical analysis and simulation results show that, when the size of the group and/or the geographical area that group members cover become large, the proposed protocol scales well; the proposed protocol is also strongly resilient to the failures.The research on the combination of wired Internet and wireless communication technologies is becoming an important research area. Most of the existing group membership management protocols are specific to the wired networks, which do not consider the characteristics of the mobile Internet such as host mobility. The proposed group membership management protocol in this paper explicitly considers the characteristics of mobile Internet, which can be used for a reference to the related works in this research area.