FDAN: Failure Detection Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This work deals with fault tolerance in distributed MANET (Mobile Ad hoc Networks) systems. However, the major issue for a failure detection protocol is to confound between a fault and a voluntary or an involuntary disconnection of nodes, and therefore to suspect correct nodes to be failing and conversely. Within this context, we propose in this paper a failure detection protocol that copes with MANET systems constraints. The aim of this work is to allow to the system to launch recovery process. For this effect, our protocol, called FDAN, is based on the class of heartbeat protocols. It takes into account: no preliminary knowledge of the network, the nodes disconnection and reconnection, resources limitation...Hence, we show that by using temporary lists and different timeout levels, we achieve to reduce sensibly the number of false suspicions.