SCALAR: Scalable data lookup and replication protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Data replication, as an essential service for MANETs, is used to increase data availability by creating local or nearly located copies of frequently used items, reduce communication overhead, achieve fault-tolerance and load balancing. Data replication protocols proposed for MANETs are often prone to scalability problems due to their definitions or underlying routing protocols they are based on. In particular, they exhibit poor performance when the network size is scaled up. However, scalability is an important criterion for several MANET applications. We propose a scalable and reactive data replication approach, named SCALAR, combined with a low-cost data lookup protocol. SCALAR is a virtual backbone based solution, in which the network nodes construct a connected dominating set based on network topology graph. To the best of our knowledge, SCALAR is the first work applying virtual backbone structure to operate a data lookup and replication process in MANETs. Theoretical message-complexity analysis of the proposed protocols is given. Extensive simulations are performed to analyze and compare the behavior of SCALAR, and it is shown to outperform the other solutions in terms of data accessibility, message overhead and query deepness. It is also demonstrated as an efficient solution for high-density, high-load, large-scale mobile ad hoc networks.