Effective data sharing in manets using cluster based replication

Replication has been a feasible solution for increasing the data availability and improving overall system performance. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), a proficient replica management is a challenging problem due to its unreliability, dynamic, and unstable and resource constrained nature. The data replication improves the data availability and when employed may increase the energy consumption. In this paper, a replication method for MANETs has been proposed with an aim to attain high data availability with an optimal energy consumption in case of network disconnection or node failure and also is scalable. The data replication is based on a cost function and also the trade-off between the communication and replication energy consumption costs is considered. The replica selection mechanism identifies suitable number of nodes to place the replica and takes benefit from a 1-hop cluster formation based on entropy coefficient. The energy utilization is kept minimal even with replication by controlling the number of data replicas and exploiting the cluster structure. The designed algorithm is simulated using NS2 and it has been observed that it effectively controls energy consumption and is adaptive with respect to the rate of replication.