Fully distributed cluster based routing architecture for mobile ad hoc networks

The design and analysis of routing protocols is an important issue in dynamic networks such as packet radio and ad-hoc wireless networks. Ad hoc wireless network is a dynamic multi-hop network, which is established by a group of mobile nodes on a shared wireless channel. The shared medium and the multi-hop nature of the wireless ad hoc networks pose fundamental challenges to the design of an effective resource allocation algorithm to maximize the aggregated utility of flows, maintaining basic fairness among the multiple flows. While the previously proposed scheduling algorithms have been shown to perform well in providing fair sharing of bandwidths among the single-hop wireless flows, they have not considered the multi-hop flow with an end-to-end perspective. Hierarchical, cluster-based routing greatly reduces the routing table sizes (compared to host-based routing) and the amount of routing related signaling traffic, at the expense of reducing path efficiency and generating some management traffic. This paper proposes a fully distributed cluster based routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks. The feasible path to a destination is calculated using the QoS information available with each cluster members. Non-overlapping clusters are created using the dynamic cluster creation algorithm. Packets are routed according to the QoS information available with each gateway node. The mobility issues are also handled in this routing architecture. Because of the hierarchical nature of architecture, the performance is unaffected by the increase in the number of mobile nodes. The cluster maintenance algorithm dynamically manages the handover and hence the efficiency is not degraded by node mobility.