A Leasing Model to Deal with Partial Failures in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) many partial failures are the result of temporary network partitions due to the intermittent connectivity of mobile devices. Some of these failures will be permanent and require application-level failure handling. However, it is impossible to distinguish a permanent from a transient failure. Leasing provides a solution to this problem based on the temporal restriction of resources. But to date no leasing model has been designed specifically for MANETs. In this paper, we identify three characteristics required for a leasing model to be usable in a MANET, discuss the issues with existing leasing models and then propose the leased object references model, which integrates leasing with remote object references. In addition, we describe an implementation of the model in the programming language AmbientTalk. Leased object references provide an extensible framework that allows programmers to express their own leasing patterns and enables both lease holders (clients) and lease grantors (services) to deal with permanent failures.