Although far from optimal, flooding is an indispensable message dissemination technique for network-wide broadcast within mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). As such, the plain flooding algorithm provokes a high number of unnecessary packet rebroadcasts, causing contention, packet collisions and ultimately wasting precious limited bandwidth. Studies have been undertaken to optimize flooding using a deterministic approach. Because of the highly dynamic and mobile characteristics of MANETs, probabilistic algorithms may be better suited. We explore the phase transition phenomenon observed in percolation theory and random graphs as a basis for defining probabilistic flooding algorithms. We consider models with and without packet collisions to better understand when phase transition occurs. We show through simulation that in cases of no collision control, probabilistic flooding greatly enhances network performance while significantly reducing broadcast packets in dense networks, although phase transition is not observed.

We propose FResher Encounter SearcH (FRESH), a simple algorithm for efficient route discovery in mobile ad hoc networks. Nodes keep a record of their most recent encounter times with all other nodes. Instead of searching for the destination, the source node searches for any intermediate node that encountered the destination more recently than did the source node itself. The intermediate node then searches for a node that encountered the destination yet more recently, and the procedure iterates until the destination is reached. Therefore, FRESH replaces the single network-wide search of current proposals with a succession of smaller searches, resulting in a cheaper route discovery. Routes obtained are loop-free. The performance of such...

Trajectory based forwarding (TBF) is a novel method to forward packets in a dense ad hoc network that makes it possible to route a packet along a predefined curve. It is a generalization of source based routing and Cartesian forwarding in that the trajectory is set by the source, but the forwarding decision is based on the relationship to the trajectory rather than the final destination. The fundamental aspect of TBF is that it decouples path naming from the actual path, thereby providing a common framework for applications such as: flooding, unicast, multicast and multipath routing, and discovery in ad hoc networks. TBF requires that nodes know their position relative to a coordinate system. While a global coordinate system a#orded by a system such as GPS would be ideal, in this paper we propose Local Positioning System (LPS), a method that only positions the nodes along the trajectory, by making use of other node capabilities, such as angle of arrival or range estimations, compasses and accelerometers. We explore several forwarding strategies that are appropriate for these node capabilities.

We propose a general framework for broadcasting in ad hoc networks through self-pruning. The approach is based on selecting a small subset of hosts (also called nodes) to form a forward node set to carry out a broadcast process. Each node, upon receiving a broadcast packet, determines whether to forward the packet based on two neighborhood coverage conditions proposed in this paper. These coverage conditions depend on neighbor connectivity and history of visited nodes, and in general, resort to global network information. Using local information such as k-hop neighborhood information, the forward node set is selected through a distributed and local pruning process. The forward node set can be constructed and maintained through either a proactive process (i.e., “up-to-date”) or a reactive process (i.e., “on-the-fly”). Several existing broadcast algorithms can be viewed as special cases of the coverage conditions with k-hop neighborhood information. Simulation results show that new algorithms, which are more efficient than existing ones, can be derived from the coverage conditions, and self-pruning based on 2- or 3-hop neighborhood information is relatively cost-effective.

Abstract not found

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) using WLAN technology have recently received considerable attention. The evaluation of VANET routing protocols often involves simulators since management and operation of a large number of real vehicular nodes is expensive. We study the behavior of routing protocols in VANETs by using mobility information obtained from a microscopic vehicular traffic simulator that is based on the on the real road maps of Switzerland. The performance of AODV and GPSR is significantly influenced by the choice of mobility model, and we observe a significantly reduced packet delivery ratio when employing the realistic traffic simulator to control mobility of nodes. To address the performance limitations of communication protocols in VANETs, we investigate two improvements that increase the packet delivery ratio and reduce the delay until the first packet arrives. The traces used in this study are available for public download.

Sensor networks often involve the monitoring of mobile phenomena, which can be facilitated by a spatiotemporal multicast protocol we call "mobicast". Mobicast is a novel spatiotemporal multicast protocol featuring a delivery zone that evolves over time. Mobicast can in theory provide absolute spatiotemporal delivery guarantees by limiting communication to a mobile forwarding zone whose size is determined by the global worst-case value associated with a compactness metric defined over the geometry of the network.In this work, we first studied the compactness properties of sensor networks with uniform distribution. The results of this study motivate three approaches for improving the e#ciency of spatiotemporal multicast in such networks. First, one may achieve high savings on communication overhead by slightly relaxing spatiotemporal delivery guarantees. Second, spatiotemporal multicast may exploit local compactness values for higher e#ciency for networks with non uniform spatial distribution of compactness. Third, for random uniformly distributed sensor network deployment, one may choose a deployment density to best support spatiotemporal communication. We also explored all these directions via mobicast simulation and results are presented in this paper.

supported by NSF CCR-0311174. Abstract — Topology control has been well studied in wireless ad hoc networks. However, only a few topology control methods take into account the low interference as a goal of the methods. Some researchers tried to reduce the interference by lowering node energy consumption (i.e. by reducing the transmission power) or by devising low degree topology controls, but none of those protocols can guarantee low interference. Recently, Burkhart et al. [?] proposed several methods to construct topologies whose maximum link interference is minimized while the topology is connected or is a spanner for Euclidean length. In this paper we give algorithms to construct a network topology for wireless ad hoc network such that the maximum (or average) link (or node) interference of the topology is either minimized or approximately minimized. Index Terms — Topology control, interference, wireless ad hoc networks.

In recent years, several position-based routing protocols have been developed for mobile ad hoc networks. Many of these protocols assume a location service is available that provides location information on the nodes in the network. In this chapter, we survey all the proposed location information services that exist in the literature to date. We classify these location information services into three categories: proactive location database systems, proactive location dissemination systems, and reactive location systems.

There exist several applications of sensor networks where reliability of data delivery can be critical. While the redundancy inherent in a sensor network might increase the degree of reliability, it by no means can provide any guaranteed reliability semantics. In this paper, we consider the problem of reliable sink-to-sensors data delivery. We first identify several fundamental challenges that need to be addressed, and are unique to a wireless sensor network environment. We then propose a scalable framework for reliable downstream data delivery that is specifically designed to both address and leverage the characteristics of a wireless sensor network, while achieving the reliability in an efficient manner. Through ns2 based simulations, we evaluate the proposed framework.