Construction and Maintenance of Backbone for Routing Protocols Enhancement in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes to use virtual backbone structure to handle control messages and reduce the effect of node mobility in mobile ad hoc networks. This structure is effective in reducing the overhead of disseminating control information and can be useful for routing protocols to enhance their performance. This paper presents a new approach to construct and maintain a virtual backbone for ad hoc mobile networks. The construction of backbone is based on the minimum connected dominating set (MCDS). A distributed procedure is presented to maintain the backbone when the mobility is introduced. Terminals in ad hoc networks are free to move anywhere and anytime. Each terminal which changes position has to execute a maintenance procedure to connect to the backbone. Simulations results show the performance of this procedure when mobility and scalability is considered. To validate our approach, we used simulation to show that using backbone, routing protocols can enhance their performances in high dynamic environment. Three reactive protocols (AODV, DSR and TORA) have been used in this simulation