An Algorithm for Message Delivery in a Micromobility Environment

With recent advances in wireless communication and the ubiquity of laptops, mobile computing has become an important research area. An essential problem in mobile computing is the delivery of a message from a source to either a single mobile node, unicast, or to a group of mobile nodes, multicast. Standard solutions proposed for macromobility (Mobile IP) and micromobility (cellular phones) for the unicast problem rely on tracking the mobile node. Tracking solutions scale badly when mobile nodes move frequently, and do not generalize well to multicast delivery. Our paper proposes a new message delivery algorithm for micromobility based on a modification of classical snapshot algorithms. Our algorithm requires no tracking, provides stronger guarantees than existing protocols in micromobility, and generalizes easily to multicasting. Besides a particular solution to the delivery problem, our approach offers a new strategy for transferring established results from distributed computing to mobile computing. The general idea is to treat mobile nodes as messages that roam across the fixed network structure and to leverage off existing distributed algorithms that compute information about messages