DESIGN OF AN ℓ–EXCLUSION ALGORITHM FOR MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Abstract–A solution to the ℓ–exclusion problem for mobile ad hoc networks aims to provide access and control over ℓ identical copies of critical resources among mobile nodes. In literature, few token–based solutions to this problem are available. However, these solutions do consider failures, such as loss or regeneration of tokens, crash or sudden recovery of nodes. This paper presents a consensus–based ℓ–exclusion algorithm that explicitly copes with mobility associated with such networks. The algorithm is fault–resilient in the sense that it can tolerate loss of messages, link failures, sudden crash or recovery of at most ℓ–1 mobile nodes. This paper presents a simulation study considering several performance metrics that can significantly impact the behavior of such an algorithm in different ad hoc settings. This paper also presents a proof of correctness and compares the algorithm with existing ones. I