Maintaining a ring structure for mobile ad hoc computing

In a mobile ad hoc (multi-hop) wireless network, the logical structure of a ring is likely to become volatile or expensive to maintain over time due to changeable network topology. Additional adverse effects take place when a process joins or leaves the computation in the presence of mobility. This paper presents a distributed algorithm that adapts a ring among mobile nodes to the network dynamics to reflect overall communication efficiency. This is achieved by modifying the ring structure in a localized, mutual exclusive fashion, thereby allowing for concurrent segment-wise modifications to proceed. Remarkably our proposal operates without global knowledge of the logical structure and can be embodied as an underlying protocol stratum that supports transparent deployments of conventional algorithms in mobile environment. Subsequent to correctness proof, simulation results show that our proposal is promising in several regards.