Mobility-adaptive protocols for managing large ad hoc networks

We propose a new protocol for efficiently managing large ad hoc networks, i.e., networks in which all nodes can be mobile. We observe that, since nodes in such networks are not necessarily equal in that they may have different resources, not all of them should be involved in basic network operations such as packet forwarding, flooding, etc. In the proposed protocol, a small subset of the network nodes is selected based on their status and they are organized to form a backbone (whence the name "backbone protocol" or simply B-protocol to our proposed solution). The B-protocol operates in two phases: first the "most suitable" nodes are selected to serve as backbone nodes, then the selected nodes are linked to form a backbone which is guaranteed to be connected if the original network is. The effectiveness of the B-protocol in constructing and maintaining in face of node mobility and node/link failure a connected backbone that uses only a small fraction of the nodes and of the links of the original networks is demonstrated via simulation. The obtained results show that both the selected backbone nodes and the links between them in the backbone are considerably smaller than the nodes and the links in the flat network.