Resource Footprint of a Manycast Protocol Implementation on Multiple Mobile Platforms

Abstract

Wireless communication is becoming the dominant form of communication and ad hoc wireless connections are posed to play a role in disaster area networks. However, research efforts on wireless ad hoc communication protocols do not pay enough attention to measurable and reproducible indications of the mobile footprint including power consumption. Protocols and applications are initially designed and studied in a simulation environment and are hard to test in in-field experiments. In this work we report a multi-platform implementation of Random-Walk Gossip, a many cast protocol designed for message dissemination in disaster areas. Our work is focused in studying the resource footprint and its impact on performance on commercially available devices. We show both how different aspects of the protocol contributes to the footprint and how this in turn affects the performance. The methodologies used here can be applied to other protocols and applications, aiding in future optimisations.