Cluster-Quality Based Hybrid Routing for Large Scale Mobile Multi-Hop Networks

The rapid proliferation of wireless devices has lead to an augmentation in mobile ad hoc networking scenarios, particularly interesting for commercial applications and to network operators. Scalability of ad hoc networks, with respect to routing has been an important research issue recently. It is well known that clustering is the commonly agreed upon solution for efficient routing, topology management and resource utilization in a large scale mobile ad hoc network topology. This paper proposed a hybrid routing mechanism for cluster-based ad hoc networks, realized through a novel cluster-quality based routing approach. The main goal of our scheme, which employs a hybrid approach, is to guarantee efficient cluster-to-cluster routing by optimizing cluster-route selection. To achieve this, we introduce a new cluster-quality metric, which is an indirect quality-of-service metric that can estimate the current performance state of participating clusters. Since, traditional QoS metrics are hard to estimate in ad hoc networks and all the more challenging in a dynamic clustered network environment, the objective is to have a better adapted mechanism for providing guaranteed routing. The authors also present an optimization algorithm for intra-cluster routing and to reduce the cluster re-organization overhead. The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations, and the results indicate that our protocol scales well with increasing node-count, node-density and node-speed. The effectiveness of the cluster-quality metric is also studied.