Consistency management among replicas in peer-to-peer mobile ad hoc networks

Recent advances in wireless communication along with Peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm have led to increasing interest in P2P mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we assume an environment where each mobile peer accesses data items held by other peers which are connected by a mobile ad hoc network. Since peers' mobility causes frequent network partitions, replicas of a data item may, be inconsistent due to write operations performed by mobile peers. In such an environment, the global consistency of data items is not desirable by many applications. Thus, new consistency maintenance based on local conditions such as location and time need to be investigated. This paper attempts to classify different consistency levels according to requirements from applications and provides protocols to realize them. We report simulation results to investigate the characteristics of these consistency protocols in a P2P wireless ad hoc network environment and their relationship with the quorum sizes.