Resource Allocation for Energy Efficient k-out-of-n System in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Resource Allocation has been widely used for improving various performance metrics in wireless networks. Applying resource allocation to a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), however, is a challenging problem because of dynamic network topology. In this paper, we develop a novel resource allocation scheme designed for MANETs that minimizes the communication cost for accessing distributed resources while improving the reliability by adopting the k-out-of-n system, a widely used technique for reliability control. Specifically, we propose a scheme that allocates resources to n nodes, called service centers, such that the expected energy consumption for nodes to access k service centers out of the n service centers (k ≤ n) is minimized. Our scheme accounts for dynamic network topology by estimating the failure probabilities of nodes and monitoring the network for significant topology changes. In addition, an Importance Sampling technique is used to reduce the computation-overhead. To evaluate the performance, we build a mobile distributed file system based on our resource allocation scheme. Through both extensive simulations and real hardware implementation on Smartphones, we show that our resource allocation scheme effectively reduces energy consumption by up to 45% and increases the successful data retrieval rate by up to 50% in comparison with a greedy algorithm.