An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. In such an environment, it may be necessary for one mobile host to enlist the aid of other hosts in forwarding a packet to its destination, due to the limited range of each mobile host’s wireless transmissions. This paper presents a protocol for routing in ad hoc networks that uses dynamic source routing. The protocol adapts quickly to routing changes when host movement is frequent, yet requires little or no overhead during periods in which hosts move less frequently. Based on results from a packet-level simulation of mobile hosts operating in an ad hoc network, the protocol performs well over a variety of environmental conditions such as host density and movement rates. For all but the highest rates of host movement simulated, the overhead of the protocol is quite low, falling to just 1 % of total data packets transmitted for moderate movement rates in a network of 24 mobile hosts. In all cases, the difference in length between the routes used and the optimal route lengths is negligible, and in most cases, route lengths are on average within a factor of 1.01 of optimal. 1.

When n identical randomly located nodes, each capable of transmitting at bits per second and using a fixed range, form a wireless network, the throughput @ A obtainable by each node for a randomly chosen destination is 2 bits per second under a noninterference protocol. If the nodes are optimally placed in a disk of unit area, traffic patterns are optimally assigned, and each transmission’s range is optimally chosen, the bit–distance product that can be transported by the network per second is 2 @ A bit-meters per second. Thus even under optimal circumstances, the throughput is only 2 bits per second for each node for a destination nonvanishingly far away. Similar results also hold under an alternate physical model where a required signal-to-interference ratio is specified for successful receptions. Fundamentally, it is the need for every node all over the domain to share whatever portion of the channel it is utilizing with nodes in its local neighborhood that is the reason for the constriction in capacity. Splitting the channel into several subchannels does not change any of the results. Some implications may be worth considering by designers. Since the throughput furnished to each user diminishes to zero as the number of users is increased, perhaps networks connecting smaller numbers of users, or featuring connections mostly with nearby neighbors, may be more likely to be find acceptance.

karp @ eecs.harvard.edu We present Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR), a novel routing protocol for wireless datagram networks that uses the po-sitions of touters and a packer's destination to make packet for-warding decisions. GPSR makes greedy forwarding decisions us-ing only information about a router's immediate neighbors in the network topology. When a packet reaches a region where greedy forwarding is impossible, the algorithm recovers by routing around the perimeter of the region. By keeping state only about the local topology, GPSR scales better in per-router state than shortest-path and ad-hoc routing protocols as the number of network destinations increases. Under mobility's frequent topology changes, GPSR can use local topology information to find correct new routes quickly. We describe the GPSR protocol, and use extensive simulation of mobile wireless networks to compare its performance with that of Dynamic Source Routing. Our simulations demonstrate GPSR's scalability on densely deployed wireless networks.

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Due to the limited transmission range of wireless network interfaces, multiple network "hops " may be needed for one node to exchange data with another across the network. In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols targeted specifically at this environment have been developed, but little performance information on each protocol and no realistic performance comparison between them is available. This paper presents the results of a detailed packet-level simulation comparing four multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols that cover a range of design choices: DSDV, TORA, DSR, and AODV. We have extended the ns-2 network simulator to accurately model the MAC and physical-layer behavior of the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard, including a realistic wireless transmission channel model, and present the results of simulations of networks of 50 mobile nodes. 1

In recent years, a wide variety of mobile computing devices has emerged, including portables, palmtops, and personal digit al assistants. Providing adequate network connectivity y for these devices will require a new generation of wireless LAN technology. In this paper we study media access protocols for a single channel wireless LAN being developed at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center. We start with the MACA media access protocol first proposed by Karn [9] and later refined by Biba [3] which uses an RTS-CTS-DATA packet exchange and binary exponential backoff. Using packet-level simulations, we examine various performance and design issues in such protocols, Our analysis leads to a new protocol, MACAW, which uses an RTS-CTS-DS-DATA-ACK message exchange and includes a significantly different backoff algorithm. 1

In this paper we present a case for using new power-aware metrics for determining routes in wireless ad hoc networks. We present five different metrics based on battery power consumption at nodes. We show that using these metrics in a shortest-cost routing algorithm reduces the cost/packet of routing packets by 5-30% over shortest-hop routing (this cost reduction is on top of a 40-70% reduction in energy consumption obtained by using PAMAS, our MAC layer protocol). Furthermore, using these new metrics ensures that the mean time to node failure is increased significantly. An interesting property of using shortest-cost routing is that packet delays do not increase. Finally, we note that our new metrics can be used in most traditional routing protocols for ad hoc networks. 1

A number of library-based parallel and sequential network simulators have been designed. This paper describes a library, called GloMoSim (for Global Mobile system Simulator), for parallel simulation of wireless networks. GloMoSim has been designed to be extensible and composable: the communication protocol stack for wireless networks is divided into a set of layers, each with its own API. Models of protocols at one layer interact with those at a lower (or higher) layer only via these APIs. The modular implementation enables consistent comparison of multiple protocols at a given layer. The parallel implementation of GloMoSim can be executed using a variety of conservative synchronization protocols, which include the null message and conditional event algorithms. This paper describes the GloMoSim library, addresses a number of issues relevant to its parallelization, and presents a set of experimental results on the IBM 9076 SP, a distributed memory multicomputer. These experiments use mo...

Over the past decade, mobile computing and wireless communication have become increasingly important drivers of many new computing applications. The eld of wireless sensor networks particularly focuses on applications involving autonomous use of compute, sensing, and wireless communication devices for both scienti c and commercial purposes. This paper examines the research decisions and design tradeos that arise when applying wireless peer-to-peer networking techniques in a mobile sensor network designed to support wildlife tracking for biology research.

The Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR) is a simple and efficient routing protocol designed specifically for use in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks of mobile nodes. DSR allows the network to be completely self-organizing and self-configuring, without the need for any existing network infrastructure or administration. The protocol is composed of the two mechanisms of Route Discovery and Route Maintenance, which work together to allow nodes to discover and maintain source routes to arbitrary destinations in the ad hoc network. The use of source routing allows packet routing to be trivially loop-free, avoids the need for up-to-date routing information in the intermediate nodes through which packets are forwarded, and allows nodes forwarding or overhearing packets to cache the routing information in them for their own future use. All aspects of the protocol operate entirely on-demand, allowing the routing packet overhead of DSR to scale automatically to only that needed to react to changes in the routes currently in use. We have evaluated the operation of DSR through detailed simulation on a variety of movement and communication patterns, and through implementation and significant experimentation in a physical outdoor ad hoc networking testbed we have constructed in Pittsburgh, and have demonstrated the excellent performance of the protocol. In this chapter, we describe the design of DSR and provide a summary of some of our simulation and testbed implementation results for the protocol. 1

In this paper we develop a new multiaccess protocol for ad hoc radio networks. The protocol is based on the original MACA protocol with the adition of a separate signalling channel. The unique feature of our protocol is that it conserves battery power at nodes by intelligently powering off nodes that are not actively transmitting or receiving packets. The manner in which nodes power themselves off does not influence the delay or throughput characteristics of our protocol. We illustrate the power conserving behavior of PAMAS via extensive simulations performed over ad hoc networks containing 10-20 nodes. Our results indicate that power savings of between 10 % and 70 % are attainable in most systems. Finally, we discuss how the idea of power awareness can be built into other multiaccess protocols as well.