Delivering messages in disconnected mobile ad-hoc networks

• Main Author: Shah, Ritesh
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/15180

Rapid advancements in wireless technologies have fuelled parallel research in two areas, one in which wireless devices use a central authority to establish and maintain the network and one in which no such central authority is used. Mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) are part of the latter research. Most researchers define a mobile ad-hoc network as "a self-organizing network formed on the fly without the aid of any established infrastructure or central authority". Many routing protocols have been developed to establish and maintain routes in MANETs. They try to address the unique challenges that MANETs present over traditional wired networks. Some of these challenges are use of unreliable wireless medium for communication and lack of a central authority to facilitate any communication in the network. These protocols find a route to a destination if such a route exists. However, in the wireless medium, links are susceptible to frequent failures, which can cause partitions in the network. Current routing protocols use a passive delivery approach for packets destined to a host in the other partition. Packets destined to a disconnected host are dropped after some route repair attempts. This thesis presents a novel protocol, Voila, that delivers messages between disconnected hosts. Voila uses the nodes moving between the neighbourhoods of the source and destination nodes to act as carriers of messages. It uses a novel Carrier Select algorithm to select carrier nodes in the source partition. The thesis describes the protocol in detail and provides a simulation-based evaluation of its performance compared to other possible schemes and the optimal scheme. === Science, Faculty of === Computer Science, Department of === Graduate