A message-efficient configuration scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network is a network in which no infrastructure for connectivity exists and participant hosts have a limited wireless transmission range. It allows mobile hosts to set up a temporary network and bears many potential applications including disaster relief, ad-hoc grouping for mobile conference, battle field communications, and so on. A communication is achieved by wireless transmission of a single hop or multi-hop. A wireless link is a shared resource, thus the effective use of a link is a very important issue in mobile ad hoc networks. A well-known scheme is to select some nodes and form a set of gateways, called a virtual backbone (VB). The key issue is to find an algorithm which builds and manages the VB efficiently. The metrics of VB algorithm``s $\It{efficiency}$ are the number of messages to build the VB, the number of participating hosts as a member of VB, and the cost to maintain the VB. The smaller the participants of a VB are, the smaller the relaying messages to the destination host are. The VB consists of two phases: the initial search and connection of related hosts ($\It{initial configuration}$ phase); and management of topology changes by host mobility and (or) failure (simply $\It{configuration management}$ phase). The algorithm to build a VB with the minimum number of participants is the same as the minimum connected dominating set (MCDS) problem, which is known as a NP-hard problem. Approximation algorithms have focused on how to find a near MCDS at the initial configuration phase, but do not manage effectively the impact of host mobility. In highly mobile networks, mobility causes frequent configuration changes and the efficient configuration management affects the performance of the VB more than the initial configuration. That is, it is more crucial to reduce the number of messages to manage configuration in the configuration management phase than in the initial configuration phase. The proposed algorithm builds an...