Connection Survival using Position-Based Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abedalmotaleb Zadin
Concordia University, 2015

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have witnessed a tremendous growth in the recent
years thanks to technological advancements and energy saving techniques that have
made possible the creation of autonomous mobile communicating systems. Still,
MANETs face many challenges in terms of stability, power consumption and quality
of service. Typically, stability is assured through the use of reliable communication
channels protected by failure recovery protocols.

In this thesis, we examine the stability problem by the elaboration of new position based
routing algorithms that maintain stable connections between nodes in MANETs.
The positions of the nodes are updated by the regular beacon broadcasts. Specifically,
we have extended the backup path mechanism used by Yang et al.'s 2011 Greedy-
Based stable multi-path Routing protocol (GBR), that have been recently used in
MANETs. In terms of stability alone, our algorithms have explored using more
general backup paths; re-establishing broken paths from the last reachable node;
or using a conservative range for neighbor next-hop selection. The latter protocol
(GBR-CNR), using a Conservative Neighborhood Range (CNR), is the most efficient
in simulations.

To be able to accommodate energy constraints typical in MANETs, we study
energy efficient variations of these stable position-based routing algorithms. We study
the use of Dynamic Transmission Ranges (DTR) or energy-aware neighbor next-hop
selection, such as the LEARN algorithm, to assure energy efficiency while preserving
connection stability. Out of all the algorithms considered, the combination of CNR
and DTR, GBR-CNR-DTR, outperforms the rest in simulation.

Concerning the Quality of Service (QoS), we consider variations of GBR-CNR
that improve QoS through the reduction of interference that affect the quality of
communications. We develop stable communication protocols that mitigate interference
between mobile nodes by minimizing the number of corrupted packets through
the use of different techniques such as defining new methods to choose the hereafter
hop in a communication process.

Overall, this thesis presents several new stable position-based routing algorithms
that improve energy consumption and QoS in MANETs. Several of the introduced
algorithms are shown to have better capabilities than previously published algorithms
as demonstrated in the simulation results.