Spotcast -- A Communication Abstraction for Proximity-Based Mobile Applications

Abstract

We introduce spot cast, a new communication abstraction specifically aimed at the development of mobile proximity-based applications running in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our motivation lies in the fact that traditional communication abstractions, typically broadcast primitives with strong consistency guarantees, do not adequately capture the intrinsic here-and-now nature of such applications. Rather, developers need a communication abstraction offering the notion of proximity-based diffusion and some level of message durability, which is precisely what spot cast provides. We illustrate how spot cast can be used to implement mobile applications and we shortly discuss the correctness and the implement ability of the spot cast abstraction in MANETs.