Self Organization and Self Maintenance of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks through Dynamic Topology Control

Abstract

Abstract.One way in which wireless nodes can organize themselves into an ad hoc network is to execute a topology control protocol, which is designed to build a network satisfying specific properties. A number of basic topology control protocols exist and have been extensively analyzed. Unfortunately, most of these protocols are designed primarily for static networks and the protocol designers simply advise that the protocols should be repeated periodically to deal with failures, mobility, and other sources of dynamism. However, continuously maintaining a network topology with basic connectivity properties is a fundamental requirement for overall network dependability. Current approaches consider failures only as an afterthought or take a static fault tolerance approach, which results in extremely high energy usage and low throughput. In addition, most of the existing topology control protocols assume that transmission power is a continuous variable and, therefore, nodes can choose an arbitrary power value between some minimum and maximum powers. However, wireless network interfaces with dynamic transmission power control permit the power to be set to one of a discrete number of possible values. This simple restriction complicates the design of the topology control protocol substantially. In this paper, we present a set of topology control protocols, which work with discrete power levels and for which we specify a version that deals specifically with dynamic networks that experience failures, mobility, and other dynamic conditions. Our protocols are also novel in the sense that they are the first to consider explicit coordination between neighboring nodes, which results in more efficient power settings. In this chapter, we present the design of these topology control protocols, and we report on extensive simulations to evaluate them and compare their performance against existing protocols. The results demonstrate that our protocols produce very similar topologies as the best protocols that assume power is a continuous variable, while having very low communication cost and seamlessly handling failures and mobility.