High level MANET protocol: Enhancing the communication support for mobile collaborative work

Mobile collaborative activities involve on-demand interactions among nomad users. Unavailability of communication support in the physical scenario where users are located cannot be a limitation to carry out such collaboration instances. Mobile workers can take advantage of the communication capability embedded in their mobile devices in order to create communication channels between them. The Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are infrastructures that can be used to support the nomad users' activities. However, these networks have a short communication threshold; therefore, they need to include a routing protocol as part of its infrastructure to allow mobile workers to collaborate when they are not physically close. This paper presents an application level routing protocol that was designed to support nomad workers performing mobile collaborative activities. The protocol, named High Level MANET Protocol (HLMP), provides several automatic services that are required by mobile collaborative systems. Some of these services are the automatic MANET formation, peer detection and messages routing. HLMP has been implemented in a mobile communication infrastructure and used in several mobile groupware systems.