UbiBay: An auction system for mobile multihop ad-hoc networks

Implementing distributed applications in mobile ad-hoc networks is a challenge because of low bandwidth, small transmission range, unpredictable topology changes and the need to conserve energy in low powered devices. This paper presents a distributed auction system using a large scale adhoc network as its sole communication platform. The auction system is built on top of a basic middleware service intended to be used as a generic background dissemination service for distributed self-organizing applications in mobile ad-hoc networks. This service is used to disseminate the local knowledge about the current state regarding a particular auction. The basic idea of this service is the combination of a device discovery service essential to any ad-hoc network and a dissemination service based on epidemic message distribution. This service can be used by different competing applications for permanent information dissemination, while consuming only a small fraction of the available limited network bandwidth in a mobile environment