Scalable routing strategies for mobile ad hoc networks

The 1990s have seen a rapid growth in research interests in Mobile A d hoc Networking. The infrastructureless and the dynamic nature of these networks demand new set of networking strategies to be implemented in order to provide efficient end-to-end communication. This, along with the diverse application of these networks in many different scenarios such as battlefield and disaster recovery, have seen M A N E T s being researched by many different organisations and institutes. M A N E T s employ the traditional TCP/IP structure to provide end-to-end communication between nodes. However, due to their mobility and the limited resource in wireless networks, each layer in the TCP/IP model requires redefinition or modifications to function efficiently in a M A N E T . One interesting research area in M A N E T is routing. Routing in the M A N E T s is a challenging task and has received a tremendous amount of attention from researches. This has led to development of many different routing protocols for M A N E T s , and each author for each protocol proposed argues that their strategy provides an improvement over a number of different strategies in the literature for a given network scenario. Therefore, it is quite difficult to determine which protocols may perform best under a number of different network scenarios, such as large node density and traffic. In this thesis we investigate the scalability of the current routing protocols designed for M A N E T s and propose a number of different routing strategies to provide higher levels of scalability. The proposed strategies use the services provided by a Global Positioning System (GPS) to achieve their objectives. Our study begins by describing the research question for this thesis and provide a theoretical performance comparison between a number of different types of solutions