RaWMS -

Abstract

RaWMS is a novel lightweight random membership service for ad hoc networks. The service provides each node with a partial uniformly chosen view of network nodes. Such a membership service is useful, e.g., in data dissemination algorithms, lookup and discovery services, peer sampling services, and complete membership construction. The design of RaWMS is based on a novel reverse random walk (RW) sampling technique. The paper includes a formal analysis of both the reverse RW sampling technique and RaWMS and verifies it through a detailed simulation study. In addition, RaWMS is compared with a number of other known methods such as flooding and gossip-based techniques.