MESHMdl event spaces — A coordination middleware for self-organizing applications in ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are gaining importance as a promising technology for flexible, proximity-based, mobile communication. However, the inherent dynamics of MANETs imposes strong limitations on the design of distributed applications. They need to be able to adapt to changing conditions quickly and organize themselves in terms of component placement and communication habits. In this paper, we present MESHMdl, a middleware that provides a high level of awareness and decoupling for application components to make them more flexible and adaptable. We focus on the Event Space as the central communication medium of MESHMdl. The Event Space offers a simple, unified communication interface for inter-agent communication as well as for communication with the middleware and resource access. Furthermore, it serves as a means for flexibly extending a MESHMdl daemon. We investigate the performance of the Event Space on different mobile devices and show that it is superior to comparable systems.