Abstract
In cooperative Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), copies of data are replicated on different mobile devices to improve system's availability. A primary or authoritative control node is assigned to act as a coordinator for the shared data copies, when this primary fails, another node has to be elected to replace the failed one. Since mobile devices have a limited battery power, the primary may fail at any time. Moreover, current primary election protocols in MANETs employ a notable wireless communication overhead which consumes a considerable amount of battery power. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol, called Primary Replacement Protocol (PRP), to replace an exhausted primary in MANETs based on the measurement of its remaining battery power early before it dies. More specifically, PRP replaces the exhausted primary with a healthy node when its remaining battery power reaches a predefined threshold. This replacement can be accomplished with much less communication overhead. Hence, our approach has two contributions: 1) reducing the chance of primary outage by early detection of potential power failure, 2) saving the power that is consumed in traditional primary election approaches due to communication overhead.