API for data dissemination protocols - evaluation with AutoCast

In the past various protocols inspired by nature and biology have been proposed to disseminate or transfer data in mobile or static ad-hoc networks. Many of them are designed for usage in wireless sensor networks or vehicular ad-hoc networks. Recently, we have developed and designed a general purpose data dissemination protocol called AutoCast in this field that we evaluated in detail by simulations. When we started to use AutoCast in real applications, we found out that the description of AutoCast is incomplete, as we provided the algorithms of AutoCast in details but did neither provide nor describe a suitable Application Programming Interface (API) and AutoCast was closely coupled to the application. The focus of this article is twofold. First, we propose an appropriate API to encapsulate data dissemination protocols like AutoCast and we specify the service interface of AutoCast in detail. This API can serve as a reference model for other nature and biologically inspired data dissemination approaches and applications. Second, we evaluate two applications based on our API with AutoCast in the field of wireless sensor networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks to illustrate the usage of the API and demonstrate the flexibility of this approach.