Flooding in wireless ad hoc networks

In an ad hoc network, each host assumes the role of a router and relays packets toward final destinations. This paper studies efficient routing mechanisms for packet flooding in ad hoc wireless networks. Because a packet is broadcast to all neighboring nodes, the optimality criteria of wireless network routing are different from that of the wired network routing. We show that the minimum cost flooding tree problem is similar to MCDS (Minimum Connected Dominating Set) problem and prove the NP-completeness of the minimum cost flooding tree problem. Then, we propose two flooding methods: self-pruning and dominant pruning. Both methods utilize the neighbor information to reduce redundant transmissions. Performance analysis shows that both methods perform significantly better than the blind flooding. Especially, dominant pruning performs close to the practically achievable best performance limit.     

The role of congestion in probabilistic broadcasting for ubiquitous wireless multi-hop networks through mediation analysis

Broadcast schemes play an important role in the performance of mobile ad hoc networks, which are a clear example of ubiquitous wireless multi-hop networks where nodes collaborate in a distributed way. They are widely used as a dissemination mechanism and as a part of the discovery phase of routing protocols. The simple flooding algorithm is the usual mechanism employed in mobile ad hoc networks, but its inefficiency has been demonstrated in congested scenarios due to the high number of collisions and contentions. However, these problems can be partially alleviated by using a probabilistic broadcast approach in which every node forwards the incoming packets according to a certain forwarding probability. In this paper, we use a simple probabilistic broadcast protocol to evaluate the effects of congestion on the performance of broadcasting in ad hoc networks through a mediation analysis. We hypothesize that the congestion mediates in the relationship between the forwarding probability (independent variable) and the output metric (dependent variable). We consider several output metrics according to the application of the broadcasting protocol such as reachability, broadcasting delay, packet delivery fraction and end to end delay. The simulation results show the existence of the mediating effects and how such effects may be counterbalanced depending on the target use of the probabilistic broadcast scheme.     

移动自组网络中采用连通支配集的有效广播技术

广播是移动自组网络(MANET)中的一种常用操作.许多移动自组网络的按需路由协议依赖于它来发现任意两个节点之间的路径.广播也是许多MANET应用中发布信息的重要手段.实现广播的直接途径是洪泛(flooding).然而,在没有有效的控制机制下,洪泛将带来严重的消息冗余、传输冲突和碰撞问题.基于图论中的连通支配集(CDS)概念,提出了一种有效的广播途径.它能较大地减小消息的冗余度,同时保持了洪泛的优点.模拟结果表明,提出的广播途径优于一个基于CDS的分布式算法和一个基于簇(cluster)的途径.     

Dynamic probabilistic broadcasting in MANETs

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the efficiency of broadcasting protocol can dramatically affect the performance of the entire network. Appropriate use of a probabilistic method can reduce the number of rebroadcasting, therefore reduce the chance of contention and collision among neighboring nodes. A good probabilistic broadcast protocol can achieve higher throughput and lower energy consumption, without sacrificing the reachability or having any significant degradation. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach that dynamically adjusts the rebroadcasting probability as per the node distribution and node movement. This is done based on locally available information and without requiring any assistance of distance measurements or exact location determination devices. We evaluate the performance of our approach by comparing it with the AODV protocol (which is based on simple flooding) as well as a fixed probabilistic approach. Simulation results show our approach performs better than both simple flooding and fixed probabilistic schemes.     

A new probabilistic broadcasting scheme for mobile ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routed networks

Broadcast is a fundamental operation used in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) for many services, such as route discovery and sending information messages. The direct method to perform broadcast is a simple flooding, which can decrease the performance of MANET. Recently, a probabilistic approach to flooding has been proposed as one of most important suggested solutions to solve the broadcast storm problem, which leads to the collision, contention and duplicated messages. This paper presents the Smart Probabilistic Broadcasting (SPB) as a new probabilistic method to improve the performance of existing on-demand routing protocols by reducing the RREQ overhead during the rout discovery operation. The simulation results show that the combination of AODV and a suitable probabilistic rout discovery can reduce the average end-to-end delay as well as overhead, while achieving low normalized routing load, compared to AODV that uses fixed probability and blind flooding. Simulation experiments have been conducted to examine our proposed scheme. The results show that SPB outperforms its counterparts and opens up a promising framework towards optimal probabilistic broadcasting.     

QoS routing with traffic distribution in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) follow a unique organizational and behavioral logic. MANETs’ characteristics such as their dynamic topology coupled with the characteristics of the wireless communication medium make Quality of Service provisioning a difficult challenge. This paper presents a new approach based on a mobile routing backbone for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in MANETs. In real-life MANETs, nodes will possess different communication capabilities and processing characteristics. Hence, we aim to identify those nodes whose capabilities and characteristics will enable them to take part in the mobile routing backbone and efficiently participate in the routing process. Moreover, the route discovery mechanism we developed for the mobile routing backbone dynamically distributes traffic within the network according to current network traffic levels and nodes’ processing loads. Simulation results show that our solution improves network throughput and packet delivery ratio by directing traffic through lowly congested regions of the network that are rich in resources. Moreover, our protocol incurs lower communication overheads than AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol) when searching for routes in the network.     

Braving the broadcast storm: infrastructural support for ad hoc routing

Several routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks have been proposed in the recent past [Broch et al., The Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Internet Draft draft-ietf-manet-dsr-03.txt, October 1999; Perkins et al., Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing, Internet Draft draft-ietf-manet-aodv-04.txt, October 1999; Haas and Pearlman, The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) for Ad Hoc Networks, Internet Draft draft-zone-routing-protocol-01.txt, August 1998; IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. 17 (8) (1999) 1454]. With the exception of a few, these protocols (i) involve all nodes in the route management process, (ii) rely on the use of broadcast relays for route computation, and (iii) are primarily reactive in nature. Related work [Broch et al., Performance Comparison of Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols, Proceedings of IEEE MOBICOM, Dallas, TX, October 1998; Johansson et al., Scenario-based Performance Analysis of Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, Proceedings of IEEE MOBICOM, Seattle, August 1999] has shown that the capacity utilization in ad hoc networks decreases significantly when broadcast relays or “broadcast storms” are performed frequently. This effect is compounded when all nodes in the network take part in the route computation.We propose and study an approach based on overlaying a virtual infrastructure (adaptation of the core, proposed in [IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. 17 (8) (1999) 1454]) on an ad hoc network and operating routing protocols over the infrastructure. The core enables routing protocols to use only a subset of nodes in the network for route management and avoid the use of broadcast relays. We evaluate the performance of dynamic source routing (DSR) [Broch et al., The Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Internet Draft draft-ietf-manet-dsr-03.txt, October 1999] and AODV [Perkins et al., Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing, Internet Draft draft-ietf-manet-aodv-04.txt, October 1999], when they are operated over the core and compare their performances against those of their basic versions. Through extensive simulations using ns-2 [Fall and Vardhan, ns notes and documentation, available from http://www-mash.cs.berkeley.edu/ns/, 1999], we show that using a virtual infrastructure significantly improves the performance of both DSR and AODV, in terms of data delivery and routing overhead, under varied network characteristics.     

按需式ad hoc移动网络路由协议的研究进展

Ad hoc移动网络是一种完全由移动主机构成的网络，网络拓扑易变，带宽，能源有限是ad hoc移动网络的主要特点，针对这些特点，目前设计的ad hoc路由协议大多采用按需查找方式，该文介绍了这方面研究的最新进展，对几种典型的按需路由协议进行了说明，分析和综合比较，文中分析了目前协议存在的一些问题并提出了相应的改进方法，最后指出了下一步研究方向。     

End-to-end support for statistical quality of service in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

In heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), different types of mobile devices with diverse capabilities may coexist in the same network. The heterogeneity of MANETs makes end-to-end support for quality of service (QoS) guarantees more difficult than in other types of networks, not to mention the limited bandwidth and frequent topology changes of these networks. Since QoS routing is the first step toward achieving end-to-end QoS guarantees in heterogeneous MANETs, we propose a QoS routing protocol for heterogeneous MANETs. The proposed protocol, called virtual grid architecture protocol (VGAP), uses a cross-layer approach in order to provide end-to-end statistical QoS guarantees. VGAP operates on a fixed virtual rectilinear architecture (virtual grid), which is obtained using location information obtained from global positioning system (GPS). The virtual grid consists of a few, but possibly more powerful, mobile nodes known as ClusterHeads (CHs) that are elected periodically. CHs discover multiple QoS routes on the virtual grid using an extended version of the open shortest path first (OSPF) routing protocol and an extended version of WFQ scheduling policy that takes into account the wireless channel state. Moreover, VGAP utilizes a simple power control algorithm at the physical layer that provides efficient energy savings in this heterogeneous setting. Simulation experiments show that VGAP has a good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end packet delay, call blocking probability, and network scalability.     

A color-theory-based energy efficient routing algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with nodes spreading in a target area have abilities of sensing, computing, and communication. Since the GPS device is expensive, we used a small number of fixed anchor nodes that are aware of their locations to help estimate the locations of sensor nodes in WSNs. To efficiently route sensed data to the destination (the server), identifying the location of each sensor node can be of great help. We adopted a range-free color-theory based dynamic localization (CDL) [Shen-Hai Shee, Kuochen Wang, I.L. Hsieh, Color-theory-based dynamic localization in mobile wireless sensor networks, in: Proceedings of Workshop on Wireless, Ad Hoc, Sensor Networks, August 2005] approach, to help identify the location of each sensor node. Since sensor nodes are battery-powered, we propose an efficient color-theory-based energy efficient routing (CEER) algorithm to prolong the life time of each sensor node. The uniqueness of our approach is that by comparing the associated RGB values among neighboring nodes, we can efficiently choose a better routing path with energy awareness. Besides, the CEER has no topology hole problem. Simulation results have shown that our CEER algorithm can save up to 50–60% energy than ESDSR [Mohammed Tarique, Kemal E. Tepe, Mohammad Naserian, Energy saving dynamic source routing for ad hoc wireless networks, in: Proceedings of Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks, April 2005, pp. 305–310] in mobile wireless sensor networks. In addition, the latency per packet of CEER is 50% less than that of ESDSR.     

Improving routing distance for geographic multicast with Fermat points in mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), each node has the ability to transmit, receive, and route packets, and also moves through the field either randomly or in accordance with a pre-planned route. For enhancing the performance of MANETs, reducing the routing distance is a primary concern. For either ad hoc or static networks, the problem of minimizing the overall routing distance during multicasting is NP-complete. Therefore, it is difficult to determine an optimal solution. This paper presents an efficient geographic multicast protocol, designated as GMFP, based on the use of Fermat points. The objective of GMFP is to improve the overall routing distance for multicast tasks. Through a series of simulations, it is shown that GMFP outperforms the conventional Position-Based Multicast protocol and FERMA protocol in terms of the total routing distance, the packet transmission delay, the packet delivery ratio, and the node energy consumption. The performance improvements provided by GMFP are apparent as the scale of the network topology increases.     

一个新的分布式最小连通支配集近似算法

在计算机网络中广泛使用广播来解决一些网络问题,设计有效的广播算法是一项重要的课题。文中提出一种分布地计算网络最小连通支配集的近似算法并给出了它的正确性证明。它只需要网络节点具有局部的网络状态信息,可伸缩性强。通过此算法可以在网络中自动形成一个虚拟骨干网,从而可为网络中的广播和路由操作提供一个有效的通信基础。模拟结果表明,文中提出的算法求得的连通支配集小,能较好地应用于一般网络以及移动自组网络中。     

A new dynamic counter-based broadcasting scheme for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Broadcasting is an essential operation in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) to transmit a message (data packet) from the sender to the rest of the network nodes. Although flooding is the simplest mechanism for broadcasting, where each node retransmits every uniquely received message exactly once, it is usually costly and results in serious redundancy, contention and collisions in the network. These problems are widely referred to as the broadcast storm problem. In the light of this, this study introduces a new counter-based broadcasting scheme to achieve efficient broadcasting in MANETs. This is achieved by using a counter-based scheme with a dynamic threshold to increase the successful delivery rate of packets and enhance the throughput of the network. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted. Our results show that the new scheme outperforms the well known exiting schemes, namely the two counter-based broadcasting scheme and blind flooding.     

A virtual subnet scheme on clustering algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks

Resolving the broadcast storm problem is an important issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, we propose an approach for constructing a virtual subnet whose nodes are logically related. The virtual subnet can be spread upon clusters of a MANET. An intelligent agent with a routing filtering table is proposed to assist the best known clustering algorithms, the original Least ID algorithm and the original Highest Connection Cluster (HCC) algorithm, to improve group communication efficiency. Our simulation covers the network factors of hop count, deprave rate, and delay time. The simulation results show that when the proposed intelligent agent is used with the HCC algorithm, the delay time was reduced by 81.84% as compared with flooding, and by 49.25% as compared with the Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing algorithm. The delay time for the Least ID algorithm assisted by the proposed agents reduced by 81.84% compared to that of flooding and by 50% compared to that of AODV.     

A modified AODV protocol for preventing blackhole attack in MANETs

Wireless Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are infrastructure-less networks commonly used for dynamic connection between nodes. These networks work without any external router for maintaining the connection and the nodes themselves behave like a router. Ad-Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing is a widely used protocol for managing communications between the mobile nodes. A blackhole attack is one in which the nodes create a false route through them and then perform malicious activities on the transmitted packets. This paper presents a modification of the existing AODV routing protocol to prevent blackhole attacks in MANETs in an erratic terrain with a high probability of packet loss. A mathematical proof is given to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with respect to the previous solution in the literature.     

Standardisation advancements in the area of routing for mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-organized and fully distributed networks that rely on the collaboration of participating devices to route data from source to destination. The MANET paradigm is expected to enable ubiquitous mobile communication and thus the proliferation of pervasive applications. The MANET Working Group (WG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is responsible for standardizing an appropriate Internet Protocol (IP) based routing protocol functionality for both static (mesh) and dynamic (mobile) wireless ad hoc network topologies. In this paper, we provide a background on the possibility to use MANETs for enabling future pervasive internet and innovative ubiquitous services. We also describe the work achieved by the MANET WG thus far on the area of secure unicast and multicast routing for MANETs. We also examine non-IETF work on this area, chiefly based on adaptive and hybrid routing. The paper then presents comparative performance evaluations of discussed routing protocols. It is mainly observed that there is a need for adaptive hybrid routing approaches in order to support future innovative and pervasive applications. Consequently, we present our conclusions.     

A scalable publish/subscribe system for large mobile ad hoc networks

Since nodes that compose mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) does not have any prior knowledge about other nodes in many cases, the publish/subscribe communication paradigm that has the decoupling and asynchrony properties can be useful to share information between nodes. Existing publish/subscribe services for MANETs can be categorized into document flooding (DF), destination-based routing (DBR), and content-based routing (CBR). Although those approaches may work well when the size of network is small, all of them suffer from the performance decline as the size of the network increases. In this paper, we compare those approaches, and then propose a scalable publish/subscribe communication scheme in large MANETs by combining DF and CBR hierarchically. Our approach is to cluster all nodes in networks and to exploit CBR and DF for the intra- and inter-cluster communication, respectively. By using this approach, we can effectively utilize benefits of both approaches. Then, we present performance evaluation results which validate our idea with respect to system performance and scalability.     

A passive tree-based backbone construction scheme for MANETs

Backbone-based broadcast schemes are effective in alleviating the broadcast storm problem in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, periodically hello packets used to maintain a backbone usually lead to extra control overhead. In this paper, passive tree-based backbone construction scheme (PTBCS) is proposed as a backbone construction scheme for MANETs. Different from other schemes, each node in PTBCS determines its role by intercepting packet transmissions in the air during a special waiting period. Hence, its most remarkable advantage is that there are no periodical packet transmissions specially for backbone construction. The property that the nodes selected by PTBCS make up a connected dominating set (CDS) of the network is proven with several ideal assumptions. Simulation results show that PTBCS is effective when compared with some other typical backbone construction schemes.     

Adjusted probabilistic route discovery in mobile ad hoc networks

Conventional on-demand route discovery methods in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) employ simple flooding method, where a mobile node blindly rebroadcasts received route request (RREQ) packets until a route to a particular destination is established. This can potentially lead to high channel contention, causing redundant retransmissions and thus excessive packet collisions in the network. This paper proposed two new probabilistic methods that can significantly reduce the number of RREQ packets transmitted during route discovery operation. Our simulation analysis reveals that equipping AODV with an appropriate probabilistic route discovery method can result in significant performance improvements in terms of routing overhead, MAC collisions and end-to-end delay while still achieving a good throughput when compared with the traditional AODV.     

Markovian-based traffic modeling for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) show very significant difference with respect to other computer networks due to the presence of extremely large packet loss bursts. The development of protocols for mobile ad hoc networks, especially multimedia protocols, require extensive evaluation either through simulation or real-life tests. Such testing consumes a great amount of resources both in terms of time and trace file sizes. Therefore, finding efficient means of reducing the amount of data that is stored and processed is quite important to accelerate the evaluation of different audio/video streaming applications. If, moreover, we are able to model the loss pattern experienced, we can further accelerate the evaluation process.In this work we propose two models based on hidden Markov chains that are able to grasp both packet arrivals and packet loss patterns in MANETs. A simpler two-state model is proposed to model losses when proactive routing protocols are used, while a more complex three-state model is proposed for reactive routing protocols. We also introduce a new set for packet loss pattern measurements that can be of interest for the evaluation of audio/video streaming applications.Experimental results show that the proposed models can adequately reproduce extremely long packet loss patterns, typical of MANET environments, with a high degree of accuracy. Overall, we find that the proposed models are able to significantly reduce both the simulation time and the trace file sizes required.