Broadcasting Support in Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Local Area Networks

• Main Authors: Shu-Ping Chang, 張淑萍
• Other Authors: Jyun-Hong Richard Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01465944637682001769

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 資訊工程學系研究所 === 91 === Broadcasting is a fundamental primitive in local area networks (LANs).Operations of many data link protocols, for example, ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) and IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol), must rely on this LAN primitive. To develop the broadcasting service in mobile ad hoc wireless LANs (WLANs) is a challenge. This is because a mobile ad hoc WLAN is a multi-hop wireless network in which messages may travel along several links from the source to the destination via a certain path. Additionally, there is no fixed network topology because of host moving. Furthermore, the broadcast nature of a radio channel makes a packet be transmitted by a node to be able to reach all neighbors. Therefore, the total number of transmissions (forward nodes) is generally used as the cost criterion for broadcasting. The problem of finding the minimum number of forward nodes in a static radio network is NP-complete. Almost all previous works, therefore, for broadcasting in the WLAN are focusing on finding approximation approaches in a, rather than, environment. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed protocol in WLANs to significantly reduce or eliminate the communication overhead in addition to maintaining positions of neighboring nodes. The important features of our proposed protocol are the adaptability to dynamic network topology change and the localized and parameterless behavior. The reduction in communication overhead for broadcasting operation is measured experimentally. From the simulation results, our protocol not only has the similar performance as the approximation approaches in the static network, but also outperforms existing ones in the adaptability to host moving.