A collaborative approach for discovery of optimal multicast routes in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Over the past couple of decades, there has been a rapid improvement in the area of wireless communication technology. The cause of such development is explored in many different application and research areas, specifically in Ad Hoc networks. Ad Hoc network is a typical distributed system that consists of static of mobile nodes which can freely move anywhere, capable of self-organizing, and effortlessly interconnect in different areas where setting up infrastructure-based network is difficult. A Mobile Ad Hoc Network is an infrastructure-less wireless and dynamically self configuring network. Compared to cellular systems, a MANET is able to maintain multi-hop communication idea over shared medium. But, the performance and capability of a MANET is much lower, contrast to cellphone technology. The unique important characteristics of a MANET like reliability, density of mobile nodes, requirement of power and energy for data transmission, throughput, stability, storage requirement decide the performance and lifetime of the underlying network. There are numerous of problems with routing information in MANETs. As mobile nodes can freely move in and out of a MANET, its topology structure can also change over time, i.e., cannot have fixed topological structure as wired networks. This causes many problems like link failure, redundant links, etc. Introducing relay nodes to avoid link failure can t be an ideal solution. In addition, the dynamic behavior and nature of the network topology of MANETs, providing a reliable and high stability route for transmitting either data or control packet to a collaborative working group becomes challenging. nitially, a novel algorithm to select Optimal Transmission Path (OTP) algorithm in a MANET has been proposed. The proposed OTP algorithm discovers an energy efficient route from source mobile node to the destination mobile node and also minimizes hop count and delay. This method mainly relies on the transmission- and receiving power of each node for efficient node selection in the current network. Thus, helps in discovery of optimal and stable multi-hop routes in a MANET. The proposed OTP algorithm has been compared with the existing solutions for discovering optimal and stable routes. The simulation results points out that the proposed OTP algorithm outperforms than the existing approaches for establishing an optimal and energy efficient multicast routes in MANETs. In addition cross layer design approach is adopted to predict link failure and for optimal route discovery. This is to increase energy efficiency and to optimize power control newline