Cross-Layer Treatment of Mobility for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

摘要

The current era of mobile communication is passing through the days of rapidly changing technologies. Such an evolving promising technology is mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The communications in ad hoc networks are adversely affected by the link failures in the network layer, and by the hidden station, mobile hidden station, neighborhood capture and asymmetric radio link problems in the MAC layer. All the problems are highly affected by mobility of the stations. If the degree of mobility of any station in a route increases, the route life time decreases. That causes frequent link failures, and results packet retransmissions, additional latency and packet loss. An algorithm to include mobility in a routing protocol to reduce packet losses in a MANET is proposed in this thesis. The proposed algorithm estimates the number of packets that can traverse through the route before it breaks because of mobility. The algorithm is implemented in dynamic source routing protocol, and simulated in Network Simulator-2. The MHS problem arises if a station is hidden due to mobility. Asymmetric/unequal radio links in can occur in MANETs/VANETs for many reasons such as hardware limitations, power saving protocols, shadowing effects, dynamic spectrum managements. A MAC protocol named extended reservation Aloha (ERA) is proposed which partially solves these problems. Then, using the concept of ERA, another MAC protocol named extended sliding frame reservation Aloha (ESFRA), which addresses all the above mentioned MAC problems, is proposed in this thesis. As safety critical information dissemination in DSRC/WAVE systems requires reliability and robustness, a network-MAC cross-layer information dissemination protocol is proposed in this thesis to address those issues. Although the layered architecture is still a good candidate for any design of wireless networks, the researchers are looking for some optimizations by interaction between neighbor layers which is called cross-layer design. So I proposed a network-MAC cross-layer algorithm, cross-layer extended sliding frame reservation Aloha (CESFRA), which solves mobility related problems, confirms low and deterministic end-to-end delay, and is robust and reliable in safety critical information dissemination up to 3rd hop. Discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) and OMNeT++ are used for all the MAC layer analyses.