EMMA: Epidemic Messaging Middleware for Ad hoc networks

The characteristics of mobile environments, with the possibility of frequent disconnections and fluctuating bandwidth, have forced a rethink of traditional middleware. In particular, the synchronous communication paradigms often employed in standard middleware do not appear to be particularly suited to ad hoc environments, in which not even the intermittent availability of a backbone network can be assumed. Instead, asynchronous communication seems to be a generally more suitable paradigm for such environments. Message oriented middleware for traditional systems has been developed and used to provide an asynchronous paradigm of communication for distributed systems, and, also for some specific mobile computing systems recently. In this paper, we present our experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating Epidemic Messaging Middleware for Ad hoc networks (EMMA), an adaptation of Java Message Service (JMS) for mobile ad hoc environments, discussing in detail the design challenges and the solutions that have been adopted.