Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 24, Issues 15–16, 1 October 2001, Pages 1554-1567
Computer Communications

Hierarchical Cellular-Based management for mobile hosts in Ad-Hoc wireless networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-3664(01)00307-3Get rights and content

Abstract

This study proposes a hierarchical Cellular-Based management model for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. The proposed management model allows the mobile host to establish a stable communication path with fewer flooding messages and smaller hop count. In the single-level management, a host is selected to act as manager, constructing a communication path and managing the mobile hosts in a specific cellular region to significantly reduce the number of flooding packets. Two-level management is also proposed, to reduce the hop count and enhance the efficiency of constructing the QoS routing path. The Cellular-Based management model is compared with Triangular- and Zone-based management models. Performance evaluation shows that hierarchical Cellular-Based management more efficiently reduces the number of flooding messages and the hop count of the routing paths.

Introduction

Scientific and technological progress is increasing the demand for communication quality and the ability to communicate with other people at any time and any place. A Personal Communication System (PCS) provides one-hop communication in which the base station (BS) facilitates communication with mobile hosts. However, certain regions are infeasible for establishing BSs or access points due to high cost, low utilization, or poor performance. Additionally, wireless infrastructure is unavailable in situations such as battlefield communications and search and rescue operations. An Ad-Hoc network consisting of mobile hosts provides low cost and high mobility communication without requiring a supporting BS or access point.

Unlike a static network, Ad-Hoc networks have no infrastructure. Each mobile host acts as a router, relaying information from one neighbor to others. Packet flooding is a general technique for establishing a routing path from source host to the destination. Recently, many researchers have investigated the routing problem, proposing many protocols to enhance performance. Most of these protocols can be classified into two categories: Table-Driven protocols or On-Demand protocols. In Table Driven [4] protocols, each host maintains a routing table according to the link states of neighbors. Consequently, although the optimal path can be found whenever a source host issues a request for communication with another host, the Table Driven routing protocol has considerable overheads in maintaining routing table.

On the other hand, the On-Demand routing protocols [1], [2], [3], [5], [6], [7], [9] establish routing path in an on-demand manner. The source host issues a search packet and spreads the packet through flooding to look for the destination host. When executing the flooding operations, hosts record the visiting path in the search packet. The destination host chooses the shortest path from the received packets and then sends a reply to the source host. Consequently, the On-Demand routing protocol takes longer to establish a routing path than the Table-Driven protocol does in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET). The search packet is spread from the source host to the destination host by a flooding operation which is very costly and results in serious redundancy, contention, and collision [10].

A set of protocols belonging to the On-Demand class can be further divided into two subclasses, namely either flat or cluster-based management. To reduce the amount of flooding packets, many protocols [8], [12] partition the MANET into several clusters or grids. Hosts in each partitioned cluster will vote for a header to manage the cluster, with the manager being responsible for controlling message exchange with the managers of neighboring clusters. Hosts wishing to establish a communication path should first send a request packet to their cluster manager, and the manager will then relay the packet to neighboring managers through flooding until the manager of the destination host is found.

These two proposed management protocols alleviate flooding, but they increase management overheads. Some other location-aware protocols [7], [11] use Global Positioning System (GPS) to provide the location information for establishing a routing path. In Ref. [7], the MANET is geographically partitioned into several grids (or called zones). Equipped with GPS, the host can identify which grid it is located in. In each grid, a host that is geographically near the center of this grid will be considered to be a manager for executing the information exchange. However, the grid size is not determined. Furthermore, in a large grid the movement of the manager will incur a situation in which the signal transmitted by the manager is too weak to communicate directly with neighboring managers. In this case, a gateway host is needed to relay the manager's message to the neighboring managers. To efficiently establish a communication path, alleviate the flooding phenomenon, minimize the data of routing table and increase the stability, a two-level Cellular-Based management protocol is offered herein. We geographically partition the MANET in a cellular way and develop a QoS routing protocol to extract a communication path with a smaller hop count by fewer flooding operations.

The rest of this study is organized as follow. Section 2 illustrates the background and basic concepts of single-level Cellular-Based management. To reduce the hop count and resolve the congestion problem, a two-level management protocol is proposed in Section 3. Meanwhile, Section 4 proposes the performance evaluation of Cellular-Based management. Conclusions are finally made in Section 5.

Section snippets

Single-level Cellular-Based management

This section first reviews the conventional routing protocol, then presents a single-level cellular-based management protocol.

Two-level Cellular-Based management

The previous section described single-level Cellular-Based management protocols. These protocols include the manager management protocol, routing protocol, and route maintenance protocol. The Cellular-Based partition was also demonstrated to be more effective than Zone (Grid)-Based partition in reducing the number of flooding packets and hops when constructing a routing path. However, single-level management suffers from two shortcomings. First, two routing paths may pass through the same

Performance study

This section uses simulation to evaluate performance, in terms of the hop count of a routing path and the number of flooding packets. The simulation environment is as follows. The size of MANET is 100×100 basic units, and signal strength is set at either 10 or 20 basic units. Fig. 17 compares single-level Zone (Grid)-Based and Cellular-Based management regarding the number of flooding packets. The signal strength in Fig. 17(a) and (b) is set at 10 and 20 units, respectively. Meanwhile, the

Conclusions and future works

This study proposed two-level Cellular-Based management for MANET. In comparison with the Zone (or Grid)-Based management model, single-level Cellular-Based management generates fewer flooding packets during path constructing. However, to resolve bandwidth congestion and reduce the number of hops on the established routing path, two-level Cellular-Based management was proposed herein. Simulation results show that Cellular-Based management works better in reducing the number of flooding packets

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Education, ROC, for partially supporting this research under contract no. 89-H-FA07-1-4 (Learning Technology).

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