Routing in the presence of groups in mobile ad hoc networks
Madhusoodan Parthasarathy, Min‐Sik Kim · International Journal of Information Technology Communications and Convergence · 2012
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of cooperative mobile nodes that communicate over a shared wireless medium, in the absence of a supporting infrastructure such as base stations. It is envisaged that MANETs will serve applications in which a group of mobile nodes collaborate to carry out a specific task, for instance, a group of mobile tourists taking a city tour. Mobile nodes participating in a group adhere to a movement pattern that maintains spatial proximity between all group members. The coordinated motion of group members and the resulting group-wise clustering of nodes, as well as the atypical traffic requirements of group mobility scenarios present a substantially different networking environment than in conventional MANETs. A routing protocol specifically tailored to exploit group mobility is, therefore, designed in this work. A service discovery-based approach to the creation of groups at the application layer and their configuration at the routing layer is first described. Next, a hierarchical design of the routing protocol that discriminates between intra- and inter-group communications is proposed. A performance evaluation of the protocol is done in network simulator-2 (ns-2).