A survey of current architectures for connecting wireless mobile ad hoc networks to the Internet

Connecting wired and wireless networks, and particularly mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs) and the global Internet, is attractive in real‐world scenarios due to its usefulness and praticality. Because of the various architectural mismatches between the Internet and MANETs with regard to their communication topology, routing protocols, and operation, it is necessary to introduce a hybrid interface capable of connecting to the Internet using Mobile IP protocol and to MANETs owing to an ad hoc routing protocol. Specifically, the approaches available in the literature have introduced updated versions of Mobile IP agents or access points at the edge of the Internet to help MANET nodes get multi‐hop wireless Internet access. The main differences in the existing approaches concern the type of ad hoc routing protocol as well as the switching algorithm used by MANET nodes to change their current Mobile IP agents based on specific switching criteria. This paper surveys a variety of approaches to providing multi‐hop wireless Internet access to MANET nodes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross‐layer design for topology control and routing in MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self‐organized and adaptive wireless network formed by dynamically gathering mobile nodes. Since the topology of the network is constantly changing, the issue of routing packets and energy conservation become challenging tasks. In this paper, we propose a cross‐layer design that jointly considers routing and topology control taking mobility and interference into account for MANETs. We called the proposed protocol as Mobility‐aware Routing and Interference‐aware Topology control (MRIT) protocol. The main objective of the proposed protocol is to increase the network lifetime, reduce energy consumption, and find stable end‐to‐end routes for MANETs. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol by comprehensively simulating a set of random MANET environments. The results show that the proposed protocol reduces energy consumption rate, end‐to‐end delay, interference while preserving throughput and network connectivity. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the characteristics of routing paths and the performance of routing protocols in vehicle‐formed mobile ad hoc networks on highways

Recently, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is becoming an important research topic. One goal of ITS is to exchange information among vehicles in a timely and efficient manner. In the ITS research community, inter‐vehicle communications (IVC) is considered a way that may be able to achieve this goal. An information network built on the top of vehicles using IVC can be viewed as a type of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In the past, several unicast routing protocols for MANET have been proposed. However, most of them are designed for general MANETs rather than for IVC networks. In this paper, we first used more realistic vehicle mobility traces generated by a microscopic traffic simulator (VISSIM) to understand the characteristics of routing paths in an IVC network. Based on the insights gained from the derived path characteristics, we designed and implemented an intelligent flooding‐based routing protocol for small‐scale IVC networks. Via several field trials conducted on highways, we compared the performance of ad hoc on‐demand distance vector (AODV) and our protocol. Our experimental results show that (1) our protocol outperforms AODV greatly in IVC networks and (2) our protocol can provide text, image, audio, and video services for small‐scale IVC networks (e.g., a platoon) quite well. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EEAODR: An energy‐efficient ad hoc on‐demand routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are characterized by random, multi‐hop topologies that do not have a centralized coordinating entity or a fixed infrastructure that may change rapidly over time. In addition, mobile nodes operate with portable and finite power sources. In this work, we propose an energy‐efficient routing protocol for MANETs to minimize energy consumption and increase the network's consistency. Traditional works mainly focused on the shortest path‐based schemes to minimize energy, which might result into network failure because some nodes might exhaust fast as they are used repetitively, while some other nodes might not be used at all. This can lead to energy imbalance and to network life reduction. We propose an energy‐efficient ad hoc on‐demand routing protocol that balances energy load among nodes so that a minimum energy level is maintained among nodes and the network life increases. We focused on increasing the network longevity by distributing energy consumption in the network. We also compared the simulation results with a popular existing on‐demand routing protocol in this area, AODV, to establish the superiority of our approach. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A routing protocol for mobile ad‐hoc networks using the profit optimization model

Recently, wireless networks have become one of the major development trends in computer network technology. Because there is no more need of the wired transmission medium, applications have thus diversified. One such growing field of wireless networks is the mobile ad‐hoc network (MANET). A MANET consists of mobile hosts (such as portable laptops, vehicles, etc.), and no fixed infrastructure is required. MANETs provide ease of self‐configuration and can extend coverage at a low cost. Numerous applications have therefore been proposed under this network environment for daily life use. Because MANETs nodes are capable of moving, MANET network topology changes frequently. Thus, the traditional routing protocols fail to fit such an environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient routing protocol for MANETs, which integrates the mathematical model of profit optimization (the Kelly formula) from the field of economics to cope with the routing problem caused by node mobility. Some numerical simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method using the network simulator NS‐2. The results show that our proposed method outperforms conventional routing protocols in packet delivery ratio comparisons; and the average end‐to‐end delays are within a tolerable range. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A novel efficient power‐saving MAC protocol for multi‐hop MANETs

Following recent advances in the performance of ad hoc networks, the limited life of batteries in mobile devices poses a bottleneck in their development. Consequently, how to minimize power consumption in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of ad hoc networks is an essential issue. The power‐saving mode (PSM) of IEEE 802.11 involves the Timing Synchronization Function to reduce power consumption for single‐hop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, the IEEE 802.11 PSM is known to result in unnecessary energy consumption as well as the problems of overheating and back‐off time delay. Hence, this study presents an efficient power‐saving MAC protocol, called p‐MANET, based on a Multi‐hop Time Synchronization Protocol, which involves a hibernation mechanism, a beacon inhibition mechanism, and a low‐latency next‐hop selection mechanism for general‐purpose multi‐hop MANETs. The main purposes of the p‐MANET protocol are to reduce significantly the power consumption and the transmission latency. In the hibernation mechanism, each p‐MANET node needs only to wake up during one out of every N beacon interval, where N is the number of beacon intervals in a cycle. Thus, efficient power consumption is achieved. Furthermore, a beacon inhibition mechanism is proposed to prevent the beacon storm problem that is caused by synchronization and neighbor discovery messages. Finally, the low‐latency next‐hop selection mechanism is designed to yield low transmission latency. Each p‐MANET node is aware of the active beacon intervals of its neighbors by using a hash function, such that it can easily forward packets to a neighbor in active mode or with the least remaining time to wake up. As a consequence, upper‐layer routing protocols can cooperate with p‐MANET to select the next‐hop neighbor with the best forwarding delay. To verify the proposed design and demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed p‐MANET, we present the theoretical analysis related to p‐MANET and also perform experimental simulations. The numerical results show that p‐MANET reduces power consumption and routing latency and performs well in extending lifetime with a small neighbor discovery time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Secure multicast routing protocols in mobile ad‐hoc networks

A mobile ad‐hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi‐hop radio network. Routing protocols in MANETs define how routes between source and destination nodes are established and maintained. Multicast routing provides a bandwidth‐efficient means for supporting group‐oriented applications. The increasing demand for such applications coupled with the inherent characteristics of MANETs (e.g., lack of infrastructure and node mobility) have made secure multicast routing a crucial yet challenging issue. Recently, several multicast routing protocols (MRP) have been proposed in MANETs. Depending on whether security is built‐in or added, MRP can be classified into two types: secure and security‐enhanced routing protocols, respectively. This paper presents a survey on secure and security‐enhanced MRP along with their security techniques and the types of attacks they can confront. A detailed comparison for the capability of the various routing protocols against some known attacks is also presented and analyzed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive zone routing protocol for ad hoc network nodes with non‐uniform mobilities

In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless NETworks (MANETs) have been developed. Performance evaluation and comparison of many of these routing protocols have been performed using detailed simulation models. Zone routing protocol (ZRP) is one of these routing protocols, which is a hybrid routing protocol that proactively maintains routing information for a local neighbourhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. The studies on ZRP have assumed homogeneous scenarios where all mobile nodes have uniform mobility and are statistically identical, lacking the studies on heterogeneous scenarios where mobile nodes move with non‐uniform mobilities in the same network. In this paper, we study the performance of ZRP in such scenarios. We propose an efficient scheme for ZRP to adapt to the non‐uniform mobilities scenario and study its performance for different mobility scenarios, network loads and network sizes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integrating machine learning in ad hoc routing: A wireless adaptive routing protocol

The nodes in a wireless ad hoc network act as routers in a self‐configuring network without infrastructure. An application running on the nodes in the ad hoc network may require that intermediate nodes act as routers, receiving and forwarding data packets to other nodes to overcome the limitations of noise, router congestion and limited transmission power. In existing routing protocols, the ‘self‐configuring’ aspects of network construction have generally been limited to the construction of routes that minimize the number of intermediate nodes on a route while ignoring the effects that the resulting traffic has on the overall communication capacity of the network. This paper presents a context‐aware routing metric that factors the effects of environmental noise and router congestion into a single time‐based metric, and further presents a new cross‐layer routing protocol, called Warp‐5 (Wireless Adaptive Routing Protocol, Version 5), that uses the new metric to make better routing decisions in heterogeneous network systems. Simulation results for Warp‐5 are presented and compared to the existing, well‐known AODV (Ad hoc On‐Demand Distance Vector) routing protocol and the reinforcement‐learning based routing protocol, Q‐routing. The results show Warp‐5 to be superior to shortest path routing protocols and Q‐routing for preventing router congestion and packet loss due to noise. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bandwidth‐satisfied routing in multi‐rate MANETs by cross‐layer approach

Previous quality‐of‐service (QoS) routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) determined bandwidth‐satisfied routes for QoS applications. Since the multi‐rate enhancements have been implemented in MANETs, QoS routing protocols should be adapted to exploit them fully. However, existing works suffer from one bandwidth‐violation problem, named the hidden route problem (HRP), which may arise when a new flow is permitted and only the bandwidth consumption of the hosts in the neighborhood of the route is computed. Without considering the bandwidth consumption to ongoing flows is the reason the problem is introduced. This work proposes a routing protocol that can avoid HRP for data rate selection and bandwidth‐satisfied route determination with an efficient cross‐layer design based on the integration of PHY and MAC layers into the network layer. To use bandwidth efficiently, we aim to select the combination of data rates and a route with minimal bandwidth consumption to the network, instead of the strategy adopted in the most previous works by selecting the combination with the shortest total transmission time. Using bandwidth efficiently can increase the number of flows supported by a network. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

IoT energy efficiency routing protocol using FHO-based clustering and improved CSO model-based routing in MANET

Many protocols, services, and electrical devices with built-in sensors have been developed in response to the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) consist of a collection of autonomous mobile nodes that can form an ad hoc network in the absence of any pre-existing infrastructure. System performance may suffer due to the changeable topology of MANETs. Since most mobile hosts operate on limited battery power, energy consumption poses the biggest challenge for MANETs. Both network lifetime and throughput improve when energy usage is reduced. However, existing approaches perform poorly in terms of energy efficiency. Scalability becomes a significant issue in large-scale networks as they grow, leading to overhead associated with routing updates and maintenance that can become unmanageable. This article employs a MANET routing protocol combined with an energy conservation strategy. The clustering hierarchy is used in MANETs to maximize the network's lifespan, considering its limited energy resources. In the MANET communication process, the cluster head (CH) is selected using Fire Hawk Optimization (FHO). When choosing nodes to act as a cluster for an extended period, CH election factors in connectivity, mobility, and remaining energy. This process is achieved using an optimized version of the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, utilizing Improved Chicken Swarm Optimization (ICSO). In comparison to existing protocols and optimization techniques, the proposed method offers an extended network lifespan ranging from 90 to 160 h and reduced energy consumption of 80 to 110 J, as indicated by the implementation results.     

Power aware scalable multicast routing protocol for MANETs

Multicasting is an effective way to provide group communication. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), multicasting can support a wide variety of applications that are characterized by a close degree of collaboration. Since MANETs exhibit severe resource constraints such as battery power, limited bandwidth, dynamic network topology and lack of centralized administration, multicasting in MANETs become complex. The existing multicast routing protocols concentrate more on quality of service parameters like end‐to‐end delay, jitter, bandwidth and power. They do not stress on the scalability factor of the multicast. In this paper, we address the problem of multicast scalability and propose an efficient scalable multicast routing protocol called ‘Power Aware Scalable Multicast Routing Protocol (PASMRP)’ for MANETs. PASMRP uses the concept of class of service with three priority levels and local re‐routing to provide scalability. The protocol also ensures fair utilization of the resources among the nodes through re‐routing and hence the lifetime of the network is increased. The protocol has been simulated and the results show that PASMRP has better scalability and enhanced lifetime than the existing multicast routing protocols. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Study of MANET routing protocols by GloMoSim simulator

This paper compares ad hoc on‐demand distance vector (AODV), dynamic source routing (DSR) and wireless routing protocol (WRP) for MANETs to distance vector protocol to better understand the major characteristics of the three routing protocols, using a parallel discrete event‐driven simulator, GloMoSim. MANET (mobile ad hoc network) is a multi‐hop wireless network without a fixed infrastructure. Following are some of our key findings: (1) AODV is most sensitive to changes in traffic load in the messaging overhead for routing. The number of control packets generated by AODV became 36 times larger when the traffic load was increased. For distance vector, WRP and DSR, their increase was approximately 1.3 times, 1.1 times and 7.6 times, respectively. (2) Two advantages common in the three MANET routing protocols compared to classical distance vector protocol were identified to be scalability for node mobility in end‐to‐end delay and scalability for node density in messaging overhead. (3) WRP resulted in the shortest delay and highest packet delivery rate, implying that WRP will be the best for real‐time applications in the four protocols compared. WRP demonstrated the best traffic scalability; control overhead will not increase much when traffic load increases. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fault-tolerant routing in adversarial mobile ad hoc networks: an efficient route estimation scheme for non-stationary environments

Designing routing schemes that would successfully operate in the presence of adversarial environments in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is a challenging issue. In this paper, we discuss fault-tolerant routing schemes operating in a network with malfunctioning nodes. Most existing MANET protocols were postulated considering scenarios where all the mobile nodes in the ad hoc network function properly, and in an idealistic manner. However, adversarial environments are common in MANET environments, and misbehaving nodes certainly degrade the performance of these routing protocols. The need for fault tolerant routing protocols was identified to address routing in adversarial environments in the presence of faulty nodes by exploring redundancy-based strategies in networks. It turns out that since the nodes are mobile, the random variables encountered are non-stationary, implying that estimation methods for stationary variables are inadequate. Consequently, in this paper, we present a new fault-tolerant routing scheme that invokes a stochastic learning-based weak estimation procedure to enhance a route estimation phase, which, in turn, is then incorporated in a route selection phase. We are not aware of any reported method that utilizes non-traditional estimates to achieve the ranking of the possible paths. The scheme, which has been rigorously tested by simulation, has been shown to be superior to the existing algorithms.     

E‐TDGO: An encrypted trust‐based dolphin glowworm optimization for secure routing in mobile ad hoc network

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are independent networks, where mobile nodes communicate with other nodes through wireless links by multihop transmission. Security is still an issue to be fixed in MANETs. Hence, a routing protocol named encrypted trust‐based dolphin glowworm optimization (DGO) (E‐TDGO) is designed using Advanced Encryption Standard‐128 (AES‐128) and trust‐based optimization model for secure routing in MANET. The proposed E‐TDGO protocol includes three phases, namely, k‐path discovery, optimal path selection, and communication. At first, k paths are discovered based on the distance and the trust level of the nodes. From the k paths discovered, the optimal path is selected using a novel algorithm, DGO, which is developed by combining glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) algorithm and dolphin echolocation algorithm (DEA). Once the optimal path is selected, communication begins in the network such that E‐TDGO protocol ensures security. The routing messages are encrypted using AES‐128 with shared code and key to offer security. The experimental results show that the proposed E‐TDGO could attain throughput of 0.11, delay of 0.01 second, packet drop of 0.44, and detection rate of 0.99, at the maximum number of rounds considered in the network of 75 nodes with attack consideration.     

HSG‐ad hoc network: A novel hierarchical star graph ad hoc network with self‐organization and routing discovery free

In ad hoc wireless networks, most data are delivered by multi‐hop routing (hop by hop). This approach may cause long delay and a high routing overhead regardless of which routing protocol is used. To mitigate this inherent characteristic, this work presents a novel ad hoc network structure that adopts dual‐card‐mode, self‐organization with specific IP naming and channel assignment to form a hierarchical star graph ad hoc network (HSG‐ad hoc). This network not only expedites data transmission but also eliminates the route discovery procedure during data transmission. Therefore, the overall network reliability and stability are significantly improved. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves substantial improvements over DSDV, AODV, and DSR in terms of average end‐to‐end delay, throughput, and packet delivery ratio. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

QoS‐aware routing and power control algorithm for multimedia service over multi‐hop mobile ad hoc network

This paper presents a QoS (quality of service) aware routing and power control algorithm consuming low transmission power for multimedia service over mobile ad hoc network. Generally, multimedia services need stringent QoS over the network. However, it is not easy to guarantee the QoS over mobile ad hoc network since its network resources are very limited and time‐varying. Furthermore, only a limited amount of power is available at mobile nodes, which makes the problem more challenging. We propose an effective routing and power control algorithm for multimedia services that satisfies end‐to‐end delay constraint with low transmission power consumption. The proposed algorithm supports the required bandwidth by controlling each link channel quality over route in a tolerable range. In addition, a simple but effective route maintenance mechanism is implemented to avoid link failures that may significantly degrade streaming video quality. Finally, performance comparison with existing algorithms is presented in respect to traditional routing performance metrics, and an achievable video quality comparison is provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm for multimedia services over mobile ad hoc network. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Challenges in the Verification of Mobile <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ad Hoc</Emphasis> Networking Systems

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) techniques are critical to the success of emerging modern warfare concepts and are required to support communications for mobile military platforms, including ships, aircrafts, and ground vehicles operating in a highly dynamic and mobile tactical communications network without fixed infrastructure. Research in Mobile Ad Hoc Networking has increased dramatically over the last few years with significant work in hardware architectures, media access and routing protocols. Until now, most of the work has been in simulation and small-scale laboratory demonstrations due to the significant resources required to implement an actual network with sufficient nodes to fully exercise the capabilities of both the hardware and software. There is significant need to develop testbeds to fully understand the behavior of ad hoc networks, performance under real-world application scenarios. This paper describes a testbed for a real system application exercised in an outdoor environment which approximates very closely the physical operational environment. The ad hoc network performance results include throughput and delay under conditions of mobility and foliage.     

Performance of a MANET directional MAC protocol with angle‐of‐arrival estimation

The use of directional antennas in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has shown to offer large throughput gains relative to omnidirectional antennas. When used in ad hoc networks, directional medium‐access‐control (DMAC) protocols usually require all nodes, or part of nodes, to be aware of their exact locations. This location information is typically provided using a global positioning system (GPS). Although GPS systems are designed to be as nearly accurate as possible, there are still estimation errors that can cause a relatively large deviation from the actual GPS receiver position. In this paper, we investigate the effect of inaccurate node position estimation on the throughput of these protocols. Our results clearly indicate that the advantages of DMAC protocols diminish if the available position information is not accurate enough. As an alternative, we propose an efficient DMAC protocol that utilizes signal parameter estimation via the rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) for direction‐of‐arrival (DOA) estimation; alleviating the need for GPS and, hence, avoiding the degrading associated with typical GPS position estimation errors. Moreover, unlike GPS‐based protocols, our protocol is suitable for both outdoor and indoor applications. Under different operating conditions and channel models, our simulation results show the throughput improvement achieved using the proposed protocol relative to the IEEE 802.11. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ad hoc mobile multicast routing using the concept of long‐lived routes

Mobile ad hoc networks are recognized by their abilities to form, sustain, and deform networks on‐the‐fly without the need for any pre‐established and fixed infrastructures. This wireless multi‐hop technology requires adaptive networking protocols with low control overhead and low power consumption to operate efficiently. Existing research so far are mainly concerned with unicast routing for ad hoc mobile networks. There is a growing interest in supporting multicast communication in an ad hoc mobile environment. In this paper, the associativity‐based ad hoc multicast (ABAM) routing protocol is proposed. The concept of association stability is utilized during multicast tree discovery, selection, and reconfiguration. This allows routes that are long‐lived to be selected, thereby reducing the frequency of route reconstructions. ABAM employs a localized route reconstruction strategy in response to migrations by source, receiver, and tree nodes. It can repair an affected subtree via a single route reconstruction operation. ABAM is robust since the repair can be triggered by a node in the tree or by the migrated node itself. ABAM is also capable of handling multicast group dynamics when mobile hosts decide to join and leave an existing multicast group. Our simulation results reveal that under different mobility scenarios and multicast group size, ABAM has low communication overhead and yields better throughput performance. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.