Contention-based forwarding for mobile ad hoc networks

Existing position-based unicast routing algorithms which forward packets in the geographic direction of the destination require that the forwarding node knows the positions of all neighbors in its transmission range. This information on direct neighbors is gained by observing beacon messages each node sends out periodically.

Due to mobility, the information that a node receives about its neighbors becomes outdated, leading either to a significant decrease in the packet delivery rate or to a steep increase in load on the wireless channel as node mobility increases. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to perform position-based unicast forwarding without the help of beacons. In our contention-based forwarding scheme (CBF) the next hop is selected through a distributed contention process based on the actual positions of all current neighbors. For the contention process, CBF makes use of biased timers. To avoid packet duplication, the first node that is selected suppresses the selection of further nodes. We propose three suppression strategies which vary with respect to forwarding efficiency and suppression characteristics. We analyze the behavior of CBF with all three suppression strategies and compare it to an existing greedy position-based routing approach by means of simulation with ns-2. Our results show that CBF significantly reduces the load on the wireless channel required to achieve a specific delivery rate compared to the load a beacon-based greedy forwarding strategy generates.     

A TCP-tailored approach to location management in mobile ad hoc networks

The main location management proposals in mobile ad hoc networks have, as a common characteristic, two distinct phases: the location query of the position of a destination node and the transmission of a flow toward the destination node. This letter proposes to send the initial packet of a flow to learn the position of its destination instead of adopting a dedicated query packet. Such an approach specially benefits TCP flows. This TCP-tailored approach can be applied to previous proposals in location management with minor changes in their particular features. We show that the proposed TCP-tailored approach reduces the cost of location management for TCP flows with respect to conventional schemes. We also evaluate the benefits that different location services take from the TCP-tailored approach.     

Future trust management framework for mobile ad hoc networks [security in mobile ad hoc]

In mobile ad hoc networks nodes should collaborate with each other to support the functions of the network. The trust management framework, which evaluates the trust of participating nodes, is used to force nodes to cooperate in a normal way. We make an effort to design a robust and attack-resistant trust management framework for the future. In this article we describe the vulnerabilities of and possible attacks on existing frameworks. An objective trust management framework is proposed to overcome these vulnerabilities. We provide a theoretical basis and skeleton for this framework. The performance evaluation and security analysis are provided showing the effectiveness and robustness of the OTMF compared with existing frameworks.     

Scalable routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

The growing interest in mobile ad hoc network techniques has resulted in many routing protocol proposals. Scalability issues in ad hoc networks are attracting increasing attention these days. We survey the routing protocols that address scalability. The routing protocols included in the survey fall into three categories: flat routing protocols; hierarchical routing approaches; GPS augmented geographical routing schemes. The article compares the scalability properties and operational features of the protocols and discusses challenges in future routing protocol designs     

A mobility measure for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobility measure for mobile ad hoc networks is proposed that is flexible because one can customize the definition of mobility using a remoteness function. The proposed measure is consistent because it has a linear relationship to the rate at which links are established or broken for a wide range of mobility scenarios, where a scenario consists of the choice of mobility model, the physical dimensions of the network, the number of nodes. This consistency is the strength of the proposed mobility measure because the mobility measure reliably represents the link change rate regardless of network scenarios.     

Spanning-tree based autoconfiguration for mobile ad hoc networks

In order to allow truly spontaneous and infrastructureless networking, autoconfiguration algorithm is needed in the practical usage of most mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This paper presents spanning-tree based autoconfiguration for mobile ad hoc networks, a novel approach for the efficient distributed address autoconfiguration. With the help of the spanning tree, the proposed scheme attempts to distribute address resources as balanced as possible at the first beginning. Since each node holds a block of free addresses, a newly joining node can obtain a free address almost immediately. Subnet partitioning and merging are well supported. Finally, analysis and simulation demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the existing approaches in terms of both communication overhead and configuration latency.     

ATCP: TCP for mobile ad hoc networks

Transport connections set up in wireless ad hoc networks are plagued by problems such as high bit error rates, frequent route changes, and partitions. If we run the transmission control protocol (TCP) over such connections, the throughput of the connection is observed to be extremely poor because TCP treats lost or delayed acknowledgments as congestion. We present an approach where we implement a thin layer between Internet protocol and standard TCP that corrects these problems and maintains high end-to-end TCP throughput. We have implemented our protocol in FreeBSD, and we present results from extensive experimentation done in an ad hoc network. We show that our solution improves the TCP's throughput by a factor of 2-3     

Rethinking information theory for mobile ad hoc networks

The subject of this article is the long standing open problem of developing a general capacity theory for wireless networks, particularly a theory capable of describing the fundamental performance limits of mobile ad hoc networks. A MANET is a peer-to-peer network with no preexisting infrastructure. MANETs are the most general wireless networks, with single-hop, relay, interference, mesh, and star networks comprising special cases. The lack of a MANET capacity theory has stunted the development and commercialization of many types of wireless networks, including emergency, military, sensor, and community mesh networks. Information theory, which has been vital for links and centralized networks, has not been successfully applied to decentralized wireless networks. Even if this was accomplished, for such a theory to truly characterize the limits of deployed MANETs it must overcome three key roadblocks. First, most current capacity results rely on the allowance of unbounded delay and reliability. Second, spatial and timescale decompositions have not yet been developed for optimally modeling the spatial and temporal dynamics of wireless networks. Third, a useful network capacity theory must integrate rather than ignore the important role of overhead messaging and feedback. This article describes some of the shifts in thinking that may be needed to overcome these roadblocks and develop a more general theory.     

Self-organized public-key management for mobile ad hoc networks

In contrast with conventional networks, mobile ad hoc networks usually do not provide online access to trusted authorities or to centralized servers, and they exhibit frequent partitioning due to link and node failures and to node mobility. For these reasons, traditional security solutions that require online trusted authorities or certificate repositories are not well-suited for securing ad hoc networks. We propose a fully self-organized public-key management system that allows users to generate their public-private key pairs, to issue certificates, and to perform authentication regardless of the network partitions and without any centralized services. Furthermore, our approach does not require any trusted authority, not even in the system initialization phase.     

A distributed MAC scheme supporting voice services in mobile ad hoc networks

Future mobile ad hoc networks are expected to support voice traffic. The requirement for small delay and jitter of voice traffic poses a significant challenge for medium access control (MAC) in such networks. User mobility presents unique difficulties in this context due to the associated dynamic path attenuation. In this paper, a MAC scheme for mobile ad hoc networks supporting voice traffic is proposed. With the aid of a low‐power probe prior to DATA transmissions, resource reservation is achieved in a distributed manner, thus leading to small packet transmission delay and jitter. The proposed scheme can automatically adapt to dynamic path attenuation in a mobile environment. Statistical multiplexing of on/off voice traffic can also be achieved by partial resource reservation for off voice flows. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Courtesy piggybacking: supporting differentiated services in multihop mobile ad hoc networks

Due to the salient characteristics such as the time-varying and error-prone wireless links, the dynamic and limited bandwidth, the time-varying traffic pattern and user locations, and the energy constraints, it is a challenging task to efficiently support heterogeneous traffic with different quality of service (CoS) requirements in multihop mobile ad hoc networks. In the last few years, many channel-dependent mechanisms are proposed to address this issue based on the cross-layer design philosophy. However, a lot of problems remain before more efficient solutions are found. One of the problems is how to alleviate the conflict between throughput and fairness for different prioritized traffic, especially how to avoid the bandwidth starvation problem for low-priority traffic when the high-priority traffic load is very high. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme named Courtesy Piggybacking to address this problem. With the recognition of interlayer coupling, our Courtesy Piggybacking scheme exploits the channel dynamics and stochastic traffic features to alleviate the conflict. The basic idea is to let the high-priority traffic help the low-priority traffic by sharing unused residual bandwidth with courtesy. Another noteworthy feature of the proposed scheme is its implementation simplicity: The scheme is easy to implement and is applicable in networks using either reservation-based or contention-based MAC protocols.     

Performance of dead reckoning‐based location service for mobile ad hoc networks

A predictive model‐based mobility tracking method, called dead reckoning, is developed for mobile ad hoc networks. It disseminates both location and movement models of mobile nodes in the network so that every node is able to predict or track the movement of every other node with a very low overhead. The basic technique is optimized to use ‘distance effect’, where distant nodes maintain less accurate tracking information to save overheads. The dead reckoning‐based location service mechanism is evaluated against three known location dissemination service protocols: simple, distance routing effect algorithm for mobility (DREAM) and geographic region summary service (GRSS). The evaluation is done with geographic routing as an application. It is observed that dead reckoning significantly outperforms the other protocols in terms of packet delivery fraction. It also maintains low‐control overhead. Its packet delivery performance is only marginally impacted by increasing speed or noise in the mobility model, that affects its predictive ability. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A multiple access collision avoidance protocol for multicast services in mobile ad hoc networks

In order to improve cross-layer optimization, we propose a multiple access collision avoidance protocol that combines RTS/CTS with scheduling algorithms to support the multicast routing protocol. We avoid collision by including additional information in the RTS. The proposed scheme, together with extra benefits, such as power saving, reliable data transmission and higher channel utilization compared with CSMA or multiple unicast, enables the support of multicast services in mobile ad hoc networks.     

The diameter of mobile ad hoc networks

With the prevalence of mobile devices, it is of much interest to study the properties of mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we extend the concept of diameter from static ad hoc network to mobile ad hoc network, which is the expected number of rounds for one node to transmit a message to all other nodes in the network, reflecting the worst end‐to‐end delay between any two node. Specifically, we investigate the diameter of identically and independently mobility model in cell‐partitioned network and random walk mobility model in two‐dimensional torus network, achieving the boundary , when (k=Ω(n)), and O(k log2k), respectively, where n is the number of nodes and k is the number of cells of network and especially under random walk mobility model . A comparison is made among the diameter of mobile ad hoc networks under identically and independently mobility model, random walk mobility model and static ad hoc network, showing that mobility dramatically decreases the diameter of the network and speed is an essential and decisive factor of diameter. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stable routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks using mobile agent

Wireless ad hoc networks are growing important because of their mobility, versatility, and ability to work with fewer infrastructures. The mobile ad hoc network is an autonomous system consisting of mobile nodes connected with wireless links. Establishing a path between two nodes is a complex task in wireless networks. It is still more complex in the wireless mobile ad hoc network because every node is no longer as an end node and an intermediate node. In this paper, it focuses on design of connectionless routing protocol for the wireless ad hoc networks based on the mobile agent concept. The proposed model tries to discover the best path taking into consideration some concerns like bandwidth, reliability, and congestion of the link. The proposed model has been simulated and tested under various wireless ad hoc network environments with the help of a different number of nodes. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is more feasible for providing reliable paths between the source and destination with the minimum control message packets over the network. It has delivered more number of packets to the destination over the network. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A location-based routing method for mobile ad hoc networks

Using location information to help routing is often proposed as a means to achieve scalability in large mobile ad hoc networks. However, location-based routing is difficult when there are holes in the network topology and nodes are mobile or frequently disconnected to save battery. Terminode routing, presented here, addresses these issues. It uses a combination of location-based routing (terminode remote routing, TRR), used when the destination is far, and link state-routing (terminode local routing, TLR), used when the destination is close. TRR uses anchored paths, a list of geographic points (not nodes) used as loose source routing information. Anchored paths are discovered and managed by sources, using one of two low overhead protocols: friend assisted path discovery and geographical map-based path discovery. Our simulation results show that terminode routing performs well in networks of various sizes. In smaller networks; the performance is comparable to MANET routing protocols. In larger networks that are not uniformly populated with nodes, terminode routing outperforms, existing location-based or MANET routing protocols.     

Secure position-based routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In large and dense mobile ad hoc networks, position-based routing protocols can offer significant performance improvement over topology-based routing protocols by using location information to make forwarding decisions. However, there are several potential security issues for the development of position-based routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a secure geographic forwarding (SGF) mechanism, which provides source authentication, neighbor authentication, and message integrity by using both the shared key and the TIK protocol. By combining SGF with the Grid Location Service (GLS), we propose a Secure Grid Location Service (SGLS) where any receiver can verify the correctness of location messages. We also propose a Local Reputation System (LRS) aiming at detecting and isolating both compromised and selfish users. We present the performance analysis of both SGLS and LRS, and compare them with the original GLS. Simulation results show that SGLS can operate efficiently by using effective cryptographic mechanisms. Results also show that LRS effectively detects and isolates message dropping attackers from the network.     

Energy efficient routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

Although establishing correct and efficient routes is an important design issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), a more challenging goal is to provide energy efficient routes because mobile nodes' operation time is the most critical limiting factor. This article surveys and classifies the energy‐aware routing protocols proposed for MANETs. They minimize either the active communication energy required to transmit or receive packets or the inactive energy consumed when a mobile node stays idle but listens to the wireless medium for any possible communication requests from other nodes. Transmission power control approach and load distribution approach belong to the former category, and sleep/power‐down mode approach belongs to the latter category. While it is not clear whether any particular algorithm or a class of algorithms is the best for all scenarios, each protocol has definite advantages/disadvantages and is well suited for certain situations. The purpose of this paper is to facilitate the research efforts in combining the existing solutions to offer a more energy efficient routing mechanism. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.