Efficient clustering-based routing protocol in mobile Ad-Hoc networks

摘要

This paper proposes a new routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed routing protocol is a kind of Hybrid Routing Protocol (HRP). It lies somewhere between Proactive Routing Protocol (PRP) and Reactive Routing Protocols (RRP). The former requires every node to maintain the full routing information, while the latter typically relies on the flooding of queries to discover a destination. The proposed routing protocol works on the basis of a virtual cluster, consisting of a collection of only those nodes that are one-hop distance away. The idea is to significantly reduce the control overheads such as route query packets as well as the flooding time for collecting the network topology information at a destination. The key feature of the proposed scheme is that it draws on short packet transfer delay of PRP and the small control overheads performance of RRP. A backup route is intended to further improve the delay performance. A disconnected route can be replaced by backup route, if available. No additional computational overheads are increased for computing the backup route. Computer simulation studies demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme. In particular, it is not sensitive to changing network topology, has shorter transfer delay, reasonable control overheads and appreciable throughput. It exhibits all these desirable characteristics without compromising on other important performance measures.