Traffic locality oriented route discovery algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks

There has been a growing interest in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) motivated by the advances in wireless technology and the range of potential applications that might be realised with such technology. Due to the lack of an infrastructure and their dynamic nature, MANETs demand a new set of networking protocols to harness the full benefits of these versatile communication systems. Great deals of research activities have been devoted to develop on-demand routing algorithms for MANETs. The route discovery processes used in most on-demand routing algorithms, such as the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), rely on simple flooding as a broadcasting technique for route discovery. Although simple flooding is simple to implement, it dominates the routing overhead, leading to the well-known broadcast storm problem that results in packet congestion and excessive collisions. A number of routing techniques have been proposed to alleviate this problem, some of which aim to improve the route discovery process by restricting the broadcast of route request packets to only the essential part of the network. Ideally, a route discovery should stop when a receiving node reports a route to the required destination. However, this cannot be achieved efficiently without the use of external resources; such as GPS location devices. In this thesis, a new locality-oriented route discovery approach is proposed and exploited to develop three new algorithms to improve the route discovery process in on-demand routing protocols. The proposal of our algorithms is motivated by the fact that various patterns of traffic locality occur quite naturally in MANETs since groups of nodes communicate frequently with each other to accomplish common tasks. Some of these algorithms manage to reduce end-to-end delay while incurring lower routing overhead compared to some of the existing algorithms such as simple flooding used in AODV. The three algorithms are based on a revised concept of traffic locality in MANETs which relies on identifying a dynamic zone around a source node where the zone radius depends on the distribution of the nodes with which that the source is “mostly” communicating. The traffic locality concept developed in this research form the basis of our Traffic Locality Route Discovery Approach (TLRDA) that aims to improve the routing discovery process in on-demand routing protocols. A neighbourhood region is generated for each active source node, containing “most” of its destinations, thus the whole network being divided into two non-overlapping regions, neighbourhood and beyond-neighbourhood, centred at the source node from that source node prospective. Route requests are processed normally in the neighbourhood region according to the routing algorithm used. However, outside this region various measures are taken to impede such broadcasts and, ultimately, stop them when they have outlived their usefulness. The approach is adaptive where the boundary of each source node’s neighbourhood is continuously updated to reflect the communication behaviour of the source node. TLRDA is the basis for the new three route discovery algorithms; notably: Traffic Locality Route Discovery Algorithm with Delay (TLRDA D), Traffic Locality Route Discovery Algorithm with Chase (TLRDA-C), and Traffic Locality Expanding Ring Search (TL-ERS). In TLRDA-D, any route request that is currently travelling in its source node’s beyond-neighbourhood region is deliberately delayed to give priority to unfulfilled route requests. In TLRDA-C, this approach is augmented by using chase packets to target the route requests associated with them after the requested route has been discovered. In TL-ERS, the search is conducted by covering three successive rings. The first ring covers the source node neighbourhood region and unsatisfied route requests in this ring trigger the generation of the second ring which is double that of the first. Otherwise, the third ring covers the whole network and the algorithm finally resorts to flooding. Detailed performance evaluations are provided using both mathematical and simulation modelling to investigate the performance behaviour of the TLRDA D, TLRDA-C, and TL-ERS algorithms and demonstrate their relative effectiveness against the existing approaches. Our results reveal that TLRDA D and TLRDA C manage to minimize end-to-end packet delays while TLRDA-C and TL-ERS exhibit low routing overhead. Moreover, the results indicate that equipping AODV with our new route discovery algorithms greatly enhance the performance of AODV in terms of end to end delay, routing overhead, and packet loss

Neighbour coverage: a dynamic probabilistic route discovery for mobile ad hoc networks

Blind flooding is extensively use in ad hoc routing protocols for on-demand route discovery, 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. Such a phenomenon induces what is known as broadcast storm problem, which has been shown to greatly increase the network communication overhead and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we show that the deleterious impact of such a problem can be reduced if measures are taken during the dissemination of RREQ packets. We propose a generic probabilistic method for route discovery, that is simple to implement and can significantly reduce the overhead associated with the dissemination of RREQs. Our analysis reveals that equipping AODV with probabilistic route discovery can result in significant reduction of routing control overhead while achieving good throughput

Energy Efficient Location Aided Routing Protocol for Wireless MANETs

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using any centralized access point, infrastructure, or centralized administration. In this paper we introduce an Energy Efficient Location Aided Routing (EELAR) Protocol for MANETs that is based on the Location Aided Routing (LAR). EELAR makes significant reduction in the energy consumption of the mobile nodes batteries by limiting the area of discovering a new route to a smaller zone. Thus, control packets overhead is significantly reduced. In EELAR a reference wireless base station is used and the network's circular area centered at the base station is divided into six equal sub-areas. At route discovery instead of flooding control packets to the whole network area, they are flooded to only the sub-area of the destination mobile node. The base station stores locations of the mobile nodes in a position table. To show the efficiency of the proposed protocol we present simulations using NS-2. Simulation results show that EELAR protocol makes an improvement in control packet overhead and delivery ratio compared to AODV, LAR, and DSR protocols.Comment: 9 Pages IEEE format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS 2009, ISSN 1947 5500, Impact factor 0.423, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

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

Efficient route discovery for reactive routing

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Information on the location of mobile nodes in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) has the potential to significantly improve network performance. This thesis uses node location information to develop new techniques for route discovery in on-demand routing protocols such as the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), thus making an important contribution to enhancing the experience of using mobile networks. A Candidate Neighbours to Rebroadcast the Route Request (CNRR) approach has been proposed to reduce the deleterious impact, known as the broadcast storm, of RREQ packets flooding in traditional on-demand routing protocols. The main concept behind CNRR is specifying a set of neighbours which will rebroadcast the received RREQ. This is a departure from the traditional approach of all receiving nodes rebroadcasting RREQs and has the effect of reducing the problem of redundancy from which mobile networks suffer. The proposed protocol has been developed in two phases: Closest-CNRR and Furthest-CNRR. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms have a significant effect as they reduce the routing overhead of the AODV protocol by up to 28% compared to the C-CNRR, and by up to 17.5% compared to the F-CNRR. Notably, the proposed algorithms simultaneously achieve better throughput and less data dropping. The Link Stability and Energy Aware protocol (LSEA) has been developed to reduce the overhead while increasing network lifetimes. The LSEA helps to control the global dissemination of RREQs in the network by eliminating those nodes that have a residual energy level below a specific threshold value from participation in end-to-end routes. The proposed LSEA protocol significantly increases network lifetimes by up to 19% compared with other on-demand routing protocols while still managing to obtain the same packet delivery ratio and network throughput levels. Furthermore, merging the LSEA and CNRR concepts has the great advantage of reducing the dissemination of RREQs in the network without loss of reachability among the nodes. This increases network lifetimes, reduces the overhead and increases the amount of data sent and received. Accordingly, a Position-based Selective Neighbour (PSN) approach has been proposed which combines the advantages of zoning and link stability. The results show that the proposed technique has notable advantages over both the AODV and MAAODV as it improves delivery ratios by 24.6% and 18.8%, respectively.Funded by National Council for Training - Sudan and the Sudan Academy of Science

Research on Quality of Service Based Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Quality of service (QoS) based routing protocols play a significant role in MANETs to maintain proper flow of data with efficient power consumption and without data loss. However, several network resource based technical challenges or issues are encountered in the design and implementation of QoS routing protocols that perform their routing function by considering the shortest route or the lowest cost. Furthermore, a secondary route is not reserved and alternative routes are not searched unless the established route is broken. The current structures of the state-of-the-art protocols for MANETs are not appropriate for today's high bandwidth and mobility requirements. Therefore, research on new routing protocols is needed, considering energy level, coverage, location, speed, movement, and link stability instead of only shortest path and lowest cost. This paper summarizes the main characteristics of QoS-based routing protocols to facilitate researchers to design and select QoS-based routing protocols. In this study, a wide range of protocols with their characteristics were classified according to QoS routing strategy, routing information update mechanism, interaction between network and MAC layer, QoS constraints, QoS guarantee type and number of discovered routes. In addition, the protocols were compared in terms of properties, design features, challenges and QoS metrics

Probabilistic route discovery for Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)

Mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs) have become of increasing interest in view of their promise to extend connectivity beyond traditional fixed infrastructure networks. In MANETs, the task of routing is distributed among network nodes which act as both end points and routers in a wireless multi-hop network environment. To discover a route to a specific destination node, existing on-demand routing protocols employ a broadcast scheme referred to as simple flooding whereby a route request packet (RREQ) originating from a source node is blindly disseminated to the rest of the network nodes. This can lead to excessive redundant retransmissions, causing high channel contention and packet collisions in the network, a phenomenon called a broadcast storm. To reduce the deleterious impact of flooding RREQ packets, a number of route discovery algorithms have been suggested over the past few years based on, for example, location, zoning or clustering. Most such approaches however involve considerably increased complexity requiring additional hardware or the maintenance of complex state information. This research argues that such requirements can be largely alleviated without sacrificing performance gains through the use of probabilistic broadcast methods, where an intermediate node rebroadcasts RREQ packets based on some suitable forwarding probability rather than in the traditional deterministic manner. Although several probabilistic broadcast algorithms have been suggested for MANETs in the past, most of these have focused on “pure” broadcast scenarios with relatively little investigation of the performance impact on specific applications such as route discovery. As a consequence, there has been so far very little study of the performance of probabilistic route discovery applied to the well-established MANET routing protocols. In an effort to fill this gap, the first part of this thesis evaluates the performance of the routing protocols Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) augmented with probabilistic route discovery, taking into account parameters such as network density, traffic density and nodal mobility. The results reveal encouraging benefits in overall routing control overhead but also show that network operating conditions have a critical impact on the optimality of the forwarding probabilities. In most existing probabilistic broadcast algorithms, including the one used here for preliminary investigations, each forwarding node is allowed to rebroadcast a received packet with a fixed forwarding probability regardless of its relative location with respect to the locations of the source and destination pairs. However, in a route discovery operation, if the location of the destination node is known, the dissemination of the RREQ packets can be directed towards this location. Motivated by this, the second part of the research proposes a probabilistic route discovery approach that aims to reduce further the routing overhead by limiting the dissemination of the RREQ packets towards the anticipated location of the destination. This approach combines elements of the fixed probabilistic and flooding-based route discovery approaches. The results indicate that in a relatively dense network, these combined effects can reduce the routing overhead very significantly when compared with that of the fixed probabilistic route discovery. Typically in a MANET there are regions of varying node density. Under such conditions, fixed probabilistic route discovery can suffer from a degree of inflexibility, since every node is assigned the same forwarding probability regardless of local conditions. Ideally, the forwarding probability should be high for a node located in a sparse region of the network while relatively lower for a node located in a denser region of the network. As a result, it can be helpful to identify and categorise mobile nodes in the various regions of the network and appropriately adjust their forwarding probabilities. To this end the research examines probabilistic route discovery methods that dynamically adjust the forwarding probability at a node, based on local node density, which is estimated using number of neighbours as a parameter. Results from this study return significantly superior performance measures compared with fixed probabilistic variants. Although the probabilistic route discovery methods suggested above can significantly reduce the routing control overhead without degrading the overall network throughput, there remains the problem of how to select efficiently forwarding probabilities that will optimize the performance of a broadcast under any given conditions. In an attempt to address this issue, the final part of this thesis proposes and evaluates the feasibility of a node estimating its own forwarding probability dynamically based on locally collected information. The technique examined involves each node piggybacking a list of its 1-hop neighbours in its transmitted RREQ packets. Based on this list, relay nodes can determine the number of neighbours that have been already covered by a broadcast and thus compute the forwarding probabilities most suited to individual circumstances