A Distributed Information Repository for Autonomic Context-Aware MANETs.
Due to the emergence of multimedia context-rich applications and services over wireless networks, networking protocols and services are becoming more and more integrated, thus relying on context and application information to support their operation. Further, wireless protocols and services now employ information from several network layers and the environment, breaking the layering paradigm. In order to cope with this increasing reliance on information, we have proposed MANIP, a middleware for MANETs that instantiates a new networking plane. The Information Plane (InP) is a distributed entity to store and disseminate information concerning the network, its services and the environment, orchestrating the collaboration among cross-layer protocols, autonomic management solutions and context-aware services. We use MANIP to support the autonomic reconfiguration of a P2P network over MANETs. Simulation results show that the MANIP-enabled solutions reduce the response time and increase the number of solved P2P queries when compared to classic, cross-layer implementations of the same protocols.