Distributed Cluster-Topology Maintenance for Mobile Collaborative Applications

Nowadays, collaborative applications play an increasing role in mobile communications in order to enable cooperation among mobile and/or stationary participants - often using the peer-to-peer (P2P) group communication paradigm. The probability of communication failures increases in mobile environments. As a consequence, frequent leaving and joining of partners can be observed resulting in unstable group topologies. A widely used approach is to divide the group into peer clusters that are fully meshed among each other. In this paper, we propose an application-independent approach for a periodic maintenance of distributed cluster-based group topologies for mobile collaborative applications. The proposed approach also dynamically adapts the overlay structure to changing network conditions. The maintenance strategy can be parametrized by several metrics. It outperforms simple overlay maintenance strategies, such as round-robin, by respecting the resource and computation limitations of mobile devices. The run-time is increased by 10% in the best case compared to LEACH, and by 3 - 5% on average. We describe the approach and evaluate its performance w.r.t. different metrics.