Adding sense of spatial locality to routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in mobile ad hoc networks. In a mobile ad hoc network, each mobile node can freely move around and the network is dynamically constructed by collections of mobile nodes without using any existing network infrastructure. Compared to static networks, it faces many problems such as the inefficiency of routing algorithms. Also, the number of control packets in any routing algorithm increases as the mobile speed or the number of mobile nodes increases. Most of the current routing protocols in ad hoc networks broadcast the control packets to the entire network. Therefore, by reducing the number of control packets, the efficiency of the network routing will be improved. If we know where the destination is, we can beam our search toward that direction. However, without using global positioning systems, how can we do this? Define the range nodes as the 1‐hop or 2‐hop neighbors of the destination node. In this paper, we propose using the range nodes to direct our searches for the destination. It can be combined with the existing routing protocols to reduce the control overhead. We show through simulations that AODV and DSR combined with the range node method outperforms the original AODV and DSR routing protocols in terms of control packets overhead. We also show that the delay introduced in find range nodes is insignificant. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A region-based routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding-based route discovery is widely assumed in existing routing protocols of wireless ad hoc networks. Network-wide flooding enables the discovery of optimal routes from sources to destinations; however, as all network nodes are required to participate in the relays of route request packets, substantial control overhead is inevitable. Some efficient broadcast schemes can suppress redundant packet relays, but they often suppress the discovery of optimal routes, too. In this article we propose to dynamically create a prerouting region between each source-destination pair and limit the propagations of route request packets only within this region. The prerouting region effectively restricts route discovery activities to the nodes that most likely constitute the optimal or near-optimal routes. Consequently, not only is route construction overhead significantly reduced; route optimality is also guaranteed. The article presents a region-based routing (REGR) protocol covering both new route formation cases and route update cases. Simulations show that our protocol is particularly beneficial to dense and large-scale mobile ad hoc networks.     

SMORT: Scalable multipath on-demand routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Increasing popularity and availability of portable wireless devices, which constitute mobile ad hoc networks, calls for scalable ad hoc routing protocols. On-demand routing protocols adapt well with dynamic topologies of ad hoc networks, because of their lower control overhead and quick response to route breaks. But, as the size of the network increases, these protocols cease to perform due to large routing overhead generated while repairing route breaks. We propose a multipath on-demand routing protocol (SMORT), which reduces the routing overhead incurred in recovering from route breaks, by using secondary paths. SMORT computes fail-safe multiple paths, which provide all the intermediate nodes on the primary path with multiple routes (if exists) to destination. Exhaustive simulations using GloMoSim with large networks (2000 nodes) confirm that SMORT is scalable, and performs better even at higher mobility and traffic loads, when compared to the disjoint multipath routing protocol (DMRP) and ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol.     

Efficient on-demand routing for mobile ad hoc wireless access networks

In this paper, we consider a mobile ad hoc wireless access network in which mobile nodes can access the Internet via one or more stationary gateway nodes. Mobile nodes outside the transmission range of the gateway can continue to communicate with the gateway via their neighboring nodes over multihop paths. On-demand routing schemes are appealing because of their low routing overhead in bandwidth restricted mobile ad hoc networks, however, their routing control overhead increases exponentially with node density in a given geographic area. To control the overhead of on-demand routing without sacrificing performance, we present a novel extension of the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol, called LB-AODV, which incorporates the concept of load-balancing (LB). Simulation results show that as traffic increases, our proposed LB-AODV routing protocol has a significantly higher packet delivery fraction, a lower end-to-end delay and a reduced routing overhead when compared with both AODV and gossip-based routing protocols.     

Safari: A self-organizing, hierarchical architecture for scalable ad hoc networking

As wireless devices become more pervasive, mobile ad hoc networks are gaining importance, motivating the development of highly scalable ad hoc networking techniques. In this paper, we give an overview of the Safari architecture for highly scalable ad hoc network routing, and we present the design and evaluation of a specific realization of the Safari architecture, which we call Masai. We focus in this work on the scalability of learning and maintaining the routing state necessary for a large ad hoc network. The Safari architecture provides scalable ad hoc network routing, the seamless integration of infrastructure networks when and where they are available, and the support of self-organizing, decentralized network applications. Safari’s architecture is based on (1) a self-organizing network hierarchy that recursively groups participating nodes into an adaptive, locality-based hierarchy of cells; (2) a routing protocol that uses a hybrid of proactive and reactive routing information in the cells and scales to much larger numbers of nodes than previous ad hoc network routing protocols; and (3) a distributed hash table grounded in the network hierarchy, which supports decentralized network services on top of Safari. We evaluate the Masai realization of the Safari architecture through analysis and simulations, under varying network sizes, fraction of mobile nodes, and offered traffic loads. Compared to both the DSR and the L+ routing protocols, our results show that the Masai realization of the Safari architecture is significantly more scalable, with much higher packet delivery ratio and lower overhead.     

ABRP: Anchor-based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks, which do not rely on any infrastructure such as access points or base stations, can be deployed rapidly and inexpensively even in situations with geographical or time constraints. Ad hoc networks are attractive in both military and disaster situations and also in commercial uses like sensor networks or conferencing. In ad hoc networks, each node acts both as a router and as a host. The topology of an ad hoc network may change dynamically, which makes it difficult to design an efficient routing protocol. As more and more wireless devices connect to the network, it is important to design a scalable routing protocol for ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present Anchor-based Routing Protocol (ABRP), a scalable routing protocol for ad hoc networks. It is a hybrid routing protocol, which combines the table-based routing strategy with the geographic routing strategy. However, GPS (Global Positioning System) (Kaplan, Understanding GPS principles and Applications, Boston: Artech House publishers, 1996) support is not needed. ABRP consists of a location-based clustering protocol, an intra-cell routing protocol and an inter-cell routing protocol. The location-based clustering protocol divides the network region into different cells. The intra-cell routing protocol routes packets within one cell. The inter-cell routing protocol is used to route packets between nodes in different cells. The combination of intra-cell and inter-cell routing protocol makes ABRP highly scalable, since each node needs to only maintain routes within a cell. The inter-cell routing protocol establishes multiple routes between different cells, which makes ABRP reliable and efficient. We evaluate the performance of ABRP using ns2 simulator. We simulated different size of networks from 200 nodes to 1600 nodes. Simulation results show that ABRP is efficient and scales well to large networks. ABRP combines the advantages of multi-path routing strategy and geographic routing strategy—efficiency and scalability, and avoids the burden—GPS support.     

Ariadne: A Secure On-Demand Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

An ad hoc network is a group of wireless mobile computers (or nodes), in which individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other to allow nodes to communicate beyond direct wireless transmission range. Prior research in ad hoc networking has generally studied the routing problem in a non-adversarial setting, assuming a trusted environment. In this paper, we present attacks against routing in ad hoc networks, and we present the design and performance evaluation of a new secure on-demand ad hoc network routing protocol, called Ariadne. Ariadne prevents attackers or compromised nodes from tampering with uncompromised routes consisting of uncompromised nodes, and also prevents many types of Denial-of-Service attacks. In addition, Ariadne is efficient, using only highly efficient symmetric cryptographic primitives.     

Throughput and delay analysis of directional‐location aided routing protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks is an integral component of intelligent transportation systems and it is an important requisite for smarter cities. Network formation and deformation among the vehicles are very frequent because of the variation in speed. Furthermore, for safety applications, messages should not face any kind of delay or collision. Therefore, establishing communication between the vehicles becomes even more challenging. Position‐based routing protocols work productively in vehicular ad hoc networks. Only finding an efficient routing protocol does not solve our purport. We need to carefully examine the effect of media access control layer parameters additionally. In the event of collisions, a large number of nodes would be re‐transmitting rather than sending fresh packets. A node busy in sending the retransmitted packet is called a backlog node. With an increase in the number of collisions, number of backlog nodes also increases, which affects the delay and throughput. In this article, we present the mathematical modeling of delay and throughput with IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (at media access control layer) for directional‐location aided routing (D‐LAR) position based routing protocol. For performance evaluation, simulation has been done in realistic environment created with SUMO (traffic simulator) and NS‐2 (network simulator). Simulation results show the comparison between D‐LAR and location aided routing (LAR) on various metrics in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio, routing overhead, throughput, and collision probability. To validate the mathematical model, analytical results has been compared with simulation results. The results confirm that performance of D‐LAR is better than LAR in terms of increasing the throughput and reduction in routing overhead and delay.     

PARO: Supporting Dynamic Power Controlled Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper introduces PARO, a dynamic power controlled routing scheme that helps to minimize the transmission power needed to forward packets between wireless devices in ad hoc networks. Using PARO, one or more intermediate nodes called redirectors elects to forward packets on behalf of source–destination pairs thus reducing the aggregate transmission power consumed by wireless devices. PARO is applicable to a number of networking environments including wireless sensor networks, home networks and mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present the detailed design of PARO and evaluate the protocol using simulation and experimentation. We show through simulation that PARO is capable of outperforming traditional broadcast-based routing protocols (e.g., MANET routing protocols) due to its energy conserving point-to-point on-demand design. We discuss our experiences from an implementation of the protocol in an experimental wireless testbed using off-the-shelf radio technology. We also evaluate the impact of dynamic power controlled routing on traditional network performance metrics such as end-to-end delay and throughput.     

DART: Dynamic Address RouTing for Scalable Ad Hoc and Mesh Networks

It is well known that the current ad hoc protocol suites do not scale to work efficiently in networks of more than a few hundred nodes. Most current ad hoc routing architectures use flat static addressing and thus, need to keep track of each node individually, creating a massive overhead problem as the network grows. Could dynamic addressing alleviate this problem? In this paper, we argue that the use of dynamic addressing can enable scalable routing in ad hoc networks. We provide an initial design of a routing layer based on dynamic addressing, and evaluate its performance. Each node has a unique permanent identifier and a transient routing address, which indicates its location in the network at any given time. The main challenge is dynamic address allocation in the face of node mobility. We propose mechanisms to implement dynamic addressing efficiently. Our initial evaluation suggests that dynamic addressing is a promising approach for achieving scalable routing in large ad hoc and mesh networks     

HOLSR: a hierarchical proactive routing mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks

This article reviews the hierarchical optimized link state routing (HOLSR) mechanism for heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks. In this work a heterogeneous mobile ad hoc network is defined as a network of mobile nodes that are characterized by different communications capabilities, such as multiple radio interfaces. The article focuses on proposing the HOLSR protocol. The HOLSR mechanism is derived from the OLSR protocol; however, unlike OLSR, the HOLSR protocol takes advantage of different mobile node capabilities to reduce the routing control overhead in large heterogeneous ad hoc networks, thus improving the performance of the routing mechanism.     

LHAP: A lightweight network access control protocol for ad hoc networks

Most ad hoc networks do not implement any network access control, leaving these networks vulnerable to resource consumption attacks where a malicious node injects packets into the network with the goal of depleting the resources of the nodes relaying the packets. To thwart or prevent such attacks, it is necessary to employ authentication mechanisms to ensure that only authorized nodes can inject traffic into the network. We propose LHAP, a hop-by-hop authentication protocol for ad hoc networks. LHAP resides in between the network layer and the data link layer, thus providing a layer of protection that can prevent or thwart many attacks from happening, including outsider attacks and insider impersonation attacks. Our detailed performance evaluation shows that LHAP incurs small performance overhead and it also allows a tradeoff between security and performance.     

Bayesian inference approach for establishing efficient routes in wireless ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamic wireless networks that have no fixed infrastructures and do not require predefined configurations. In this infrastructure-less paradigm, nodes in addition of being hosts, they also act as relays and forward data packets for other nodes in the network. Due to limited resources in MANETs such as bandwidth and power, the performance of the routing protocol plays a significant role. A routing protocol in MATET should not introduce excessive control messages to the network in order to save network bandwidth and nodes power. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach based on Bayesian inference to enable efficient routing in MANETs. Nodes in the proposed approach utilize the broadcast nature of the wireless channel to observe the network topology by overhearing wireless transmissions at neighboring nodes in a distributed manner, and learn from these observations when taking packet forwarding decision on the IP network layer. Our simulation results show that our routing approach reduces the number of control message (routing overhead) by a ratio up to 20 % when the network size is 60 nodes, while maintaining similar average route establishment delay as compared to the ad-hoc on demand routing protocol.     

The COMMIT Protocol for Truthful and Cost-Efficient Routing in Ad Hoc Networks with Selfish Nodes

We consider the problem of establishing a route and sending packets between a source/destination pair in ad hoc networks composed of rational selfish nodes whose purpose is to maximize their own utility. In order to motivate nodes to follow the protocol specification, we use side payments that are made to the forwarding nodes. Our goal is to design a fully distributed algorithm such that (1) a node is always better off participating in the protocol execution (individual rationality), (2) a node is always better off behaving according to the protocol specification (truthfulness), (3) messages are routed along the most energy-efficient (least cost) path, and (4) the message complexity is reasonably low. We introduce the COMMIT protocol for individually rational, truthful, and energy-efficient routing in ad hoc networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ad hoc routing protocol with these features. COMMIT is based on the VCG payment scheme in conjunction with a novel game-theoretic technique to achieve truthfulness for the sender node. By means of simulation, we show that the inevitable economic inefficiency is small. As an aside, our work demonstrates the advantage of using a cross-layer approach to solving problems: Leveraging the existence of an underlying topology control protocol, we are able to simplify the design and analysis of our routing protocol and reduce its message complexity. On the other hand, our investigation of the routing problem in the presence of selfish nodes disclosed a new metric under which topology control protocols can be evaluated: the cost of cooperation.     

A hybrid multiagent routing approach for wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless ad-hoc networks are infrastructureless networks that comprise wireless mobile nodes able to communicate each other outside wireless transmission range. Due to frequent network topology changes in one hand and the limited underlying bandwidth in the other hand, routing becomes a challenging task. In this paper we present a novel routing algorithm devoted for mobile ad hoc networks. It entails both reactive and proactive components. More precisely, the algorithm is based on ant general behavior, but differs from the classic ant methods inspired from Ant-Colony-Optimization algorithm [1]. We do not use, during the reactive phase, a broadcasting technique that exponentially increases the routing overhead, but we introduce a new reactive route discovery technique that considerably reduces the communication overhead. In the simulation results, we show that our protocol can outperform both Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol [2], one of the most important current state-of-the-art algorithms, and AntHocNet protocol [5], one of the most important ant-based routing algorithms, in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and the communication overhead.     

Routing with Guaranteed Delivery in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

We consider routing problems in ad hoc wireless networks modeled as unit graphs in which nodes are points in the plane and two nodes can communicate if the distance between them is less than some fixed unit. We describe the first distributed algorithms for routing that do not require duplication of packets or memory at the nodes and yet guarantee that a packet is delivered to its destination. These algorithms can be extended to yield algorithms for broadcasting and geocasting that do not require packet duplication. A byproduct of our results is a simple distributed protocol for extracting a planar subgraph of a unit graph. We also present simulation results on the performance of our algorithms.     

A Connectivity-Based Multi-Lane Routing Optimization Algorithm in Vehicular Communication

This paper proposed a connectivity-based multi-lane geographic routing protocol (CGRP) for vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed CGRP is based on an effective selection of road intersections through which a package must pass from source to destination. The cooperative connectivity probability and delay are taken into consideration when choosing the most suitable path for delay-sensitive safety traffic. Analytical expressions for cooperative connectivity probability is derived based on a three-lanes path model. Geographical forwarding is used to transfer packets between any two intersections on the path, reducing the path sensitivity to individual node movements. Furthermore, forwarding packets between two adjacent intersections also depend on geographic location information. Neighbor nodes’ priority are assigned according to position, speed, direction and other factors. Node with the highest priority will be selected as the next hop. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the exsiting routing protocols in terms of the end-to-end delay and the number of hops with a little cost of routing overhead in city environments.     

Active routing for ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are wireless multihop networks whose highly volatile topology makes the design and operation of a standard routing protocol hard. With an active networking approach, one can define and deploy routing logic at runtime in order to adapt to special circumstances and requirements. We have implemented several active ad hoc routing protocols that configure the forwarding behavior of mobile nodes, allowing data packets to be efficiently routed between any two nodes of the wireless network. Isolating a simple forwarding layer in terms of both implementation and performance enables us to stream delay-sensitive audio data over the ad hoc network. In the control plane, active packets permanently monitor the connectivity and setup, and modify the routing state     

Primary user supported routing protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc networks in search of higher throughput

A routing protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs), namely, primary user supported routing (PSR) is demonstrated in this research. Unlike existing routing protocols for CRAHN, where routing of cognitive users (CUs) is accomplished within CUs, in this proposed protocol, some of the primary users (PUs) support CUs to communicate, by forwarding CU packets. This service provided by PU is of voluntary nature. However, such assistance shall be provided by the PUs, only when they are idle, thereby, preserving the principles of cognitive radio networks (CRNs), which indicates that the operation of PU should not be disturbed by the CU activities. The proposed work is compared with cognitive ad hoc on-demand distance vector (CAODV) protocol. The performance parameters considered are routing overhead, rate of loss of packets, and e2e packet delay. PSR outperforms CAODV in all these performance parameters. There has been on average 26.25% improvement in routing overhead, 34.12% decrease in loss, and 27.01% improvement in e2e delivery in the proposed PSR.     

On the Performance of the HSLS Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

The area of mobile ad hoc networks has recently attracted much scientific interest, as a very appealing research area with many open issues and still unsolved problems. One of the main issues that concerns researchers is the development of routing algorithms that present good performance and face a hostile environment. Many routing protocols have been proposed, attempting to minimize routing overhead, or to reduce the energy consumed by nodes in order to maximize their lifetime. A critical issue, though, is the development of routing protocols that have the ability to maintain their good characteristics at an acceptable level as the network population grows, an ability known as scalability. FSR, ZRP, HierLS and FSLS protocol family are only a sample of scalable algorithms that have been proposed so far. The HSLS protocol is a member of the FSLS family that is proved to scale the best among the algorithms of the FSLS protocol family. In this paper we propose a mechanism to enhance the already good characteristics of the HSLS protocol aiming at the reduction of routing overhead of the original protocol. This new scheme, which we called AFHSLS, exploits the so-called border nodes, in order to deliver routing packets to their destinations. The new algorithm is proved through simulations to significantly reduce routing overhead, with minor or practically no effect on other metrics, such as packet delivery ratio and delay of data packets. Georgios Koltsidas received his Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 2003.Currently, his is working towards his Ph.D. in the same department. His research interests include routing and medium access for ad hoc and sensor networks, as well as resource management in UMTS networks. Gerasimos Dimitriadis received his Diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 2001. He is currently working towards his Ph.D. degree in the same department. His research interests include medium access, as well as routing in multihop wireless networks. Fotini-Niovi Pavlidou holds a Diploma and a PhD in Telecommunications networks from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where she is currently engaged in teaching and research on Mobile Communications and Telecommunications Networks. Her research interests include traffic analysis and design of networks, performance evaluation and QoS studies of mobile satellite communications and multimedia applications over Internet. She is a permanent reviewer in IEEE journals, she has served as Guest-Editor of Special issues in International Journals like IJWIN, WPC etc. She is permanently included in the Program Committee of many IEEE conferences (PIMRC, GLOBECOM, VTC'2001, ISSSTA'2000). She is involved in many European Projects (research or Education): Telematics Applications (INTERVUSE, ATTACH, etc), IST (ISMAEL,B-Bone, SatNEx, OPERA, etc), Tempus programs on Wireless Systems for Albania, Bulgaria, Poland. She is a Senior Member of IEEE (Communications and Vehicular Technology Society), currently chairing the Joint VTS & AES Greece Chapter (http://newton.ee.auth.gr/ieee)