A DHT-based Routing Solution for Hierarchical MANETs

Carleton University, Ontario, Canada. August 2018.

This thesis presents an effective routing solution for the backbone of hierarchical Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Our solution leverages the storage and retrieval mechanisms of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to make routing information available in a decentralized fashion, while supporting different forms of node and network mobility scenarios effectively. We do so by splitting a flat network into clusters, each having a gateway who participates in a DHT overlay. These gateways interconnect the clusters in a backbone network. Two routing approaches for the backbone are explored: flooding, which we use as a base approach, and our solution, which is DHT-based. We compare the performance of our solution against the flooding approach via experimentation in a simulator. Our results show that our DHT-based solution, even in the presence of mobility, achieved above 90% success rates and maintained very low and constant round trip times, which was not the case with the flooding approach. The advantage of our proposed approach increases as the number of clusters increases, demonstrating the superior scalability of our proposed approach.

 

We focus on jointly solving the contention and congestion distributed control problem in a bounded queue MANETs. The resulting ow rates satisfy fairness criteria according to a given Network Utility Maximization (NUM) function. In recent years a number of papers have presented solutions to the same problem based on NUM algorithms. However, this work typically necessitates either complex computations, heavy signalling/control overhead, and/or approximated sub-optimal results. In this work, we employ and adapt the IEEE 802.11 protocol in the NUM with a simple and efficient queue management mechanism. Unlike the majority of the published work in this area, we focus on the feasibility of the proposed solution in case of random static and mobile networks considering the overheads and the signalling methods.