A context-aware group management middleware to support resource sharing in MANET environments

Recent advances in Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANET) technologies promote new opportunities for users to share resources from ubiquitous points of attachment, when changing physical locations and even when no statically deployed network infrastructure is available. However, the highly dynamic nature of Mobile Ad-Hoc environments causes users to experience continuous changes in the set of the locally accessible resources, thus increasing the complexity of resource sharing. Novel middleware solutions are required to support the various management issues involved in resource sharing in MANETs environments. In particular, it is crucial to handle and to propagate up to the application level the visibility of both the users that are willing to group together to share their resources and of the resources they decide to share. The paper proposes a group management middleware (AGAPE) that, as a key feature, exploits the visibility of context information, e.g., user location, user attributes and preferences, access device properties, to create and discover groups of interest for resource sharing, to monitor the availability of groups members, and to dynamically arrange/requalify group members bindings to shared resources as changes in context operating conditions occur. Application developers can exploit the AGAPE support to build on top of it various application-specific resource sharing strategies and mechanisms, such as Global Virtual Data Structures. Finally, the paper presents a MANET-enabled emergency rescue application scenario to show and to evaluate the functioning of AGAPE.