Mobile ad hoc backbones: Formation and maintenance

This paper presents a new protocol for the formation and maintenance of a backbone from the nodes of an ad hoc network where all the nodes are mobile. The new protocol is defined and its performance evaluated with respect to metrics such as its size, that favors scalability, its connectivity in time, which allows protocols to run efficiently, robustness and route length. Via ns2-based simulation experiments we demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed protocol for mobile ad hoc backbones in achieving a manageable size of the produced backbone, a connectivity in time which is maintained for the greatest majority of the simulation time, considerable robustness even at lower densities and route lengths that are negligibly bigger that the length of the routes in the flat network topology.