A Reliable Position-based Clustering Routing Protocol For Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a special and attractive type of new wireless networks. It is an autonomous system that can dynamically be set up anywhere and anytime without using any pre-existing network infrastructure and its mobile hosts are free to move randomly. Host mobility in MANET causes failure of wireless links between nodes and breaks all the routes that use these links. Consequently, route reconstructions are needed, which is one of the most crucial issues for this type of wireless networks. There are two common solutions to this problem which increase the route reliability (lifetime) in MANETs; increasing the reliability of the links by using more reliable links and multipath route discovery. In this paper, both these schemes are used to develop a reliable unicast routing protocol for MANETs. As the first step, an efficient cross layer link reliability metric is proposed for reliable link selection. Reliable routing protocols for MANETs use many link reliability metrics for finding reliable links; four of the most commonly used are: Link Expiration Time, Probabilistic Link Reliable Time, Link Packet Error Rate and Link Received Signal Strength. The cross layer metric combines the aforementioned metrics by means of a weight function. The value of the weighting factors of this function are determined by the Response Surface Methodology. Next a reliable position based clustering routing protocol is designed. In this protocol the mobile nodes form disjoint sets of clusters, and for increasing the stability of these clusters, the aforementioned cross layer link reliability metric is used for cluster formation. A route is constructed and represented by a sequence of clusters and more reliable links are selected for data transfer inside and between the clusters. Because of the multiple links which usually exist between the clusters, multipath route scheme is used in this routing protocol in addition to the reliable link selection. Simulation results show that by using this protocol the lowest number of route reconstructions is achieved in comparison with the other related protocols.