MELON: A Persistent Message-Based Communication Paradigm for MANETs

In this paper we introduce MELON, a new communication paradigm tailored to mobile ad hoc networks, based on novel interactions with a distributed shared message store. MELON provides remove-only, read-only, and private messages, as well as bulk message operations. The dynamic nature of MANETs is addressed with persistent messages, completely distributed message storage, and flexible communication patterns. We quantitatively compare a prototype implementation of MELON to existing paradigms to show its feasibility as the basis for new MANET applications. Experiments demonstrate 40 % better throughput on average than traditional paradigms, as well as 70 % faster local insertion and removal operations compared to an existing tuple space library.