On improved MANET network utilization

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a new opportunity for mobile networking using intelligent mobile terminals. However, the widely used shortest path first based routing algorithm leads to various network utilization problems. Mobile terminals have limited power, hence, power saving should be considered when terminals serve as intermediate nodes in MANET. Furthermore, ad hoc routing table calculation is distributed among all network terminals. Therefore, we also need to construct stable paths with longer lifetime in order to reduce the communication overhead introduced by route reconstruction. A less evenly distributed traffic exhausts power on the nodes in the center of the network and leads to shorter path lifetime. Such a network deployment is not fair for the internal nodes. The above problems exist for all routing protocols especially proactive routing protocols based on shortest path first algorithm OLSR. In this paper we study the MANET network utilization in term of load distribution and path lifetime. Our careful simulation results demonstrate that the standard shortest path first algorithm leads to worse load balancing and reduced path lifetime compared to our proposal. When the most unstable network topology is considered, our proposal achieves better network utilization by reducing the peak transmission per node by 15% and the standard deviation of transmission per node by 50%. The average lifetime for established paths is doubled under the most unstable topology.