Partitionable group membership in mobile ad hoc networks
In Mobile Ad hoc NETworks or MANETs, partitionable group membership is a basic service for building partition-tolerant applications. None of the existing specifications satisfy the two following antagonistic requirements: 1) it must be strong enough to simplify the design of partition-tolerant distributed applications in partitionable systems; 2) it must be weak enough to be implantable. In this thesis, we propose a solution to partitionable group membership in very dynamic network environment such as MANETs. To this means, we proceed in three steps. First, we develop a dynamic distributed system model that characterises stability in MANETs. Then, we propose a solution to the problem of partitionable group membership by adapting Paxos for such systems. This adatation results in a specification of abortable consensus AC which is composed of an eventual α partition-participants detector ♢PPD and an eventual register per partition ♢RPP. ♢PPD guarantees liveness in a partition even if the partition is not completely stable whereas ♢RPP ensures safety in the same partition. Finally, partitionable group membership is solved by transforming it into a sequence of abortable consensus instances AC. Each of the modules ♢PPD, ♢RPP, AC, and partitionable group membership is implanted and proved. Next, we analyse the performances of ♢PPD by simulation