SITAN: Services for Fault-Tolerant Ad Hoc Networks with Unknown Participants

TL;DR

SITAN is a middleware providing fault-tolerant communication and coordination services for ad hoc networks with uncertain participants, enabling reliable distributed applications despite network unreliability and malicious nodes.

Contribution

It introduces a Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol stack for ad hoc networks, implemented in Android and NS-3, addressing participant uncertainty and malicious behavior.

Findings

Protocols complete within acceptable time frames

Middleware supports reliable distributed applications in unreliable environments

Effective in scenarios with malicious nodes

Abstract

The evolution of mobile devices with various capabilities (e.g., smartphones and tablets), together with their ability to collaborate in impromptu ad hoc networks, opens new opportunities for the design of innovative distributed applications. The development of these applications needs to address several difficulties, such as the unreliability of the network, the imprecise set of participants, or the presence of malicious nodes. In this paper we describe a middleware, called SITAN, that offers a number of communication, group membership and coordination services specially conceived for these settings. These services are implemented by a stack of Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols, enabling applications that are built on top of them to operate correctly despite the uncertainty of the environment. The protocol stack was implemented in Android and NS-3, which allowed the experimentation in representative scenarios. Overall, the results show that the protocols are able to finish their execution within a small time window, which is acceptable for various kinds of applications.