Oriented Multicasting Protocol - Network Agent Search Protocol (OMP-NASP)

Description

Many protocols and applications need a dynamic discovery mechanism to enable a given node to locate one or several specific nodes involved in the same communication. However, there is no protocol ready to fulfill this service at the network layer. Every protocol usually implements its own solution often based on an algorithm called expanding rings search (ERS). This algorithm searches those specific nodes in all directions and thus uses much bandwidth. However a typical search can usually restrict its scan in a specific direction. We introduce a network-level search protocol based on an oriented multicast routing algorithm. The multicast is directed towards a special target node, involved in the communication, in order to search only in a specific area. The aim is to choose an area as small as possible to reduce network flooding but one that still contains many potential nodes to be able to satisfy the search. Therefore, we propose a network agent search protocol (NASP) in replacement of the ERS. This protocol is based on an oriented multicasting protocol (OMP) in order to ensure an efficiency higher than the ERS. The oriented multicasting principle is to channel the multicasting of search packets towards a special node, involved in the communication, in order to scan only an interesting but limited area of the network. We have implemented both of our protocols as well as the ERS in the network simulator ns-2. The source code is available here for evaluation purposes. We provide comparative simulation results between our protocol and the ERS. Our latest simulation results are available here for scrutiny and can also be found in our latest publications concerning OMP-NASP.

Source code

OMP-NASP source code for ns-2.1b7a

License

OMP-NASP source code is released under the same BSD license as ns-2.

Data

OMP-NASP simulation parameters and results

Last updated: May 19, 2003.