Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

ADAPT: Enabling Legacy Applications for Ad-hoc Networks
Stefan Götz, Klaus Wehrle
Since September 2007, the German Research Society DFG funds the project "Adapt" at the
LuFG Informatik 4. The goal of this research project is to enable the re-use of existing and
established Internet applications in mobile ad-hoc networks. Based on a modular protocol
framework, it focuses on mechanisms to provide Internet-based applications a runtime
environment with Internet-like characteristics. Furthermore, its scope includes the
development and demonstration of transparent extension of existing applications, services,
and protocols for their specific use in mobile ad-hoc networks.
In such ad-hoc communication scenarios it remains desirable to employ existing applications
which users are familiar with, and communication applications in particular. However, mobile
ad-hoc networks inherently exhibit specific characteristics which break fundamental
assumptions of Internet-based applications. These diverging prerequisites so far hamper or
prevent to directly use existing Internet applications in mobile ad-hoc networks and require
direct modifications that are time consuming and potentially prohibitively expensive.
Thus, Adapt builds on a protocol framework in which protocols and functional entities
operate as uniform, exchangeable software components. However, this flexibility also poses
the challenge how to compose individual protocol components into a functionally sound
communication sub-system, based on the requirements of the execution environment, the
application, and the user. On the one hand, today's approaches such as a classification of
protocols into the small number of TCP/IP layers are too rigid and inflexible, on the other
hand requiring user interaction for such configuration decisions is not an option. Thus, a main
research focus in Adapt lies on the possibilities of extensible semantic descriptions of
protocols and runtime parameters. With this approach, the composition of protocol
components can be guided by functional and qualitative criteria instead of coarse-grained
static classifications.
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