Abstract | In this work we investigate the problem of communication among mobile hosts, one of the most fundamental problems in ad-hoc mobile networks that is at the core of many algorithms. Our work investigates the extreme case of total absence of any fixed network backbone or centralized administration, instantly forming networks based only on mobile hosts with wireless communication capabilities, where topological connectivity is subject to frequent, unpredictable change.
For such dynamically changing networks we propose a set of protocols which exploit the coordinated (by the protocol) motion of a small part of the network in order to manage network operations. We show that such protocols can be designed to work correctly and efficiently for communication by avoiding message flooding. Our protocols manage to establish communication between any pair of mobile hosts in small, a-priori guaranteed expected time bounds. Our results exploit and further develop some fundamental properties of random walks in finite graph.
Apart from studying the general case, we identify two practical and interesting cases of ad-hoc mobile networks: a) hierarchical ad-hoc networks, b) highly changing ad-hoc networks, for which we propose protocols that efficiently deal with the problem of basic communication.
We have conducted a set of extensive experiments, comprised of thousands of mobile hosts in order to validate the theoretical results and show that our protocols achieve very efficient communication under different scenaria. |