Performance evaluation of an efficient counter-based scheme for mobile ad hoc networks based on realistic mobility model

Flooding is the simplest and commonly used mechanism for broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Despite its simplicity, it can result in high redundant retransmission, contention and collision in the network, a phenomenon referred to as broadcast storm problem. Several probabilistic broadcast schemes have been proposed to mitigate this problem inherent with flooding. Recently, we have proposed a hybrid-based scheme as one of the probabilistic scheme, which combines the advantages of pure probabilistic and counter-based schemes to yield a significant performance improvement. Despite these considerable numbers of proposed broadcast schemes, majority of these schemes’ performance evaluation was based on random waypoint model. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of our broadcast scheme using a community based mobility model which is based on social network theory and compare it against widely used random waypoint mobility model. Simulation results have shown that using unrealistic movement pattern does not truly reflect on the actual performance of the scheme in terms of saved-rebroadcast, reachability and end to end delay

A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks. The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page

Bandwidth and Energy-Efficient Route Discovery for Noisy Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is used in on-demand routing protocols to discover routes in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). On-demand routing protocols, such as Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) commonly employ pure flooding based broadcasting to discover new routes. In pure flooding, a route request (RREQ) packet is broadcast by the source node and each receiving node rebroadcasts it. This continues until the RREQ packet arrives at the destination node. Pure flooding generates excessive redundant routing traffic that may lead to the broadcast storm problem (BSP) and deteriorate the performance of MANETs significantly. A number of probabilistic broadcasting schemes have been proposed in the literature to address BSP. However, these schemes do not consider thermal noise and interference which exist in real life MANETs, and therefore, do not perform well in real life MANETs. Real life MANETs are noisy and the communication is not error free. This research argues that a broadcast scheme that considers the effects of thermal noise, co-channel interference, and node density in the neighbourhood simultaneously can reduce the broadcast storm problem and enhance the MANET performance. To achieve this, three investigations have been carried out: First, the effect of carrier sensing ranges on on-demand routing protocol such as AODV and their impact on interference; second, effects of thermal noise on on-demand routing protocols and third, evaluation of pure flooding and probabilistic broadcasting schemes under noisy and noiseless conditions. The findings of these investigations are exploited to propose a Channel Adaptive Probabilistic Broadcast (CAPB) scheme to disseminate RREQ packets efficiently. The proposed CAPB scheme determines the probability of rebroadcasting RREQ packets on the fly according to the current Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) and node density in the neighbourhood. The proposed scheme and two related state of the art (SoA) schemes from the literature are implemented in the standard AODV to replace the pure flooding based broadcast scheme. Ns-2 simulation results show that the proposed CAPB scheme outperforms the other schemes in terms of routing overhead, average end-to-end delay, throughput and energy consumption

IF-MANET: Interoperable framework for heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

The advances in low power micro-processors, wireless networks and embedded systems have raised the need to utilize the significant resources of mobile devices. These devices for example, smart phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and sensors are gaining enormous processing power, storage capacity and wireless bandwidth. In addition, the advancement in wireless mobile technology has created a new communication paradigm via which a wireless network can be created without any priori infrastructure called mobile ad hoc network (MANET). While progress is being made towards improving the efficiencies of mobile devices and reliability of wireless mobile networks, the mobile technology is continuously facing the challenges of un-predictable disconnections, dynamic mobility and the heterogeneity of routing protocols. Hence, the traditional wired, wireless routing protocols are not suitable for MANET due to its unique dynamic ad hoc nature. Due to the reason, the research community has developed and is busy developing protocols for routing in MANET to cope with the challenges of MANET. However, there are no single generic ad hoc routing protocols available so far, which can address all the basic challenges of MANET as mentioned before. Thus this diverse range of ever growing routing protocols has created barriers for mobile nodes of different MANET taxonomies to intercommunicate and hence wasting a huge amount of valuable resources. To provide interaction between heterogeneous MANETs, the routing protocols require conversion of packets, meta-model and their behavioural capabilities. Here, the fundamental challenge is to understand the packet level message format, meta-model and behaviour of different routing protocols, which are significantly different for different MANET Taxonomies. To overcome the above mentioned issues, this thesis proposes an Interoperable Framework for heterogeneous MANETs called IF-MANET. The framework hides the complexities of heterogeneous routing protocols and provides a homogeneous layer for seamless communication between these routing protocols. The framework creates a unique Ontology for MANET routing protocols and a Message Translator to semantically compare the packets and generates the missing fields using the rules defined in the Ontology. Hence, the translation between an existing as well as newly arriving routing protocols will be achieved dynamically and on-the-fly. To discover a route for the delivery of packets across heterogeneous MANET taxonomies, the IF-MANET creates a special Gateway node to provide cluster based inter-domain routing. The IF-MANET framework can be used to develop different middleware applications. For example: Mobile grid computing that could potentially utilise huge amounts of aggregated data collected from heterogeneous mobile devices. Disaster & crises management applications can be created to provide on-the-fly infrastructure-less emergency communication across organisations by utilising different MANET taxonomies

Hybrid probabilistic broadcast schemes for mobile ad hoc networks

Broadcasting is one of the fundamental data dissemination mechanisms in mobile ad hoc network (MANET), which is, for instance, extensively used in many routing protocols for route discovery process. The dynamic topology and limited communication bandwidth of such networks pose a number of challenges in designing an efficient broadcasting scheme for MANETs. The simplest approach is flooding, where each node retransmit every unique received packet exactly once on each outgoing link. Although flooding ensures that broadcast packet is received by all network nodes, it generates many redundant transmissions which can trigger high transmission collision and contention in the network, a phenomenon referred to as the broadcast storm. Several probabilistic broadcast algorithms have been proposed that incur low communication overhead to mitigate the broadcast storm problem and tend to show superior adaptability in changing environments when compared to deterministic (i.e., non-probabilistic) schemes. However, most of these schemes reduce redundant broadcasts at the expense of reachability, a requirement for near-global network topological information or support from additional hardware. This research argues that broadcast schemes that combine the important features of fixed probabilistic and counter-based schemes can reduce the broadcast storm problem without sacrificing reachability while still achieving better end-to-end delay. To this end, the first part of this research investigate the effects of forwarding probabilities and counter threshold values on the performance of fixed probabilistic and counter-based schemes. The findings of this investigation are exploited to suggest a new hybrid approach, the Probabilistic Counter-Based Scheme (PCBS) that uses the number of duplicate packets received to estimate neighbourhood density and assign a forwarding probability value to restrict the generation of so many redundant broadcast packets. The simulation results reveal that under various network conditions PCBS reduces the number of redundant transmissions, collision rate and end-to-end delay significantly without sacrificing reachability when compared against counter-based, fixed probabilistic and flood broadcasting. Often in MANETs, there are regions of different node density due to node mobility. As such, PCBS can suffer from a degree of inflexibility in terms of rebroadcast probability, since each node is assigned the same forwarding probability regardless of its local neighbourhood conditions. To address this shortcoming, the second part of this dissertation proposes an Adjusted Probabilistic Counter-Based Scheme (APCBS) that dynamically assigns the forwarding probability to a node based on its local node density using a mathematical function. Thus, a node located in a sparse region of the network is assigned a high forwarding probability while a node located in denser region is assigned a relatively lower forwarding probability. These combined effects enhance end-to-end delay, collision rate and reachability compared to PCBS variant. The performance of most broadcasting schemes that have been suggested for MANETs including those presented here, have been analysed in the context of “pure” broadcast scenarios with relatively little investigation towards their performance impact on specific applications such as route discovery process. The final part of this thesis evaluates the performance of the well-known AODV routing protocol when augmented with APCBS route discovery. Results indicate that the resulting route discovery approach reduces the routing overhead, collision rate and end-to-end delay without degrading the overall network throughput compared to the existing approaches based on flooding, counterbased and fixed probabilistic route discovery

An Adaptive Probabilistic Model for Broadcasting in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc peer-to-peer mobile phone networks (phone MANETs) enable cheap village level telephony for cash-strapped, off-the-grid communities. Broadcasting is a fundamental operation in such manets and is used for route discovery. This paper proposed a new broadcast technique that is lightweight, efficient and incurs low latency. Using extensive simulations, we compare our proposed technique to existing lightweight protocols. The results show that our technique is successful in outperforming existing lightweight techniques on the criteria that are critical for a phone-MANET.

Efficient Broadcasting for a Mobile Ad-hoc Network based Peer-to-peer Community Radio Service

Ad-hoc networks consisting entirely of simple mobile phones can be used to deploy village level telephony. We investigate a novel application for such networks – a peer-to peer community radio service. We envision a system, where any user in the network is equally empowered to generate and distribute audio content to the entire network, using his or her mobile phone. This study concentrates on a critical aspect of this service – the choice of the network-wide broadcast protocol. Using extensive simulations, we evaluate the suitability of various broadcast techniques for a rural peer-to-peer mobile adhoc network. Our simulations identify the best choice of protocols under various village network conditions while simultaneously identifying limitations of the current protocols.