Differential Evolution Based Fault Tolerant Topology Control in MANETs

We study a fault tolerant differential evolution based topology control mechanism, called TCM-Y, to direct the movements of autonomous vehicles that dynamically adjust their speed and directions in MANETs. TCM-Y uses a Yao graph inspired fitness function to preserve a node's minimum desired number of connections with its neighbors while uniformly dispersing mobile nodes in an unknown terrain. We present a formal analysis of TCM-Y to show that it provides a fault tolerant node spreading mechanism since any node will have at least k neighbors at all times. The effectiveness of TCM-Y is evaluated by comparing it with a popular deterministic node spreading mechanism called Constrained Coverage for Mobile Sensor Nodes (CC-MSN) that has similar objectives as TCM-Y. Experimental results obtained from our simulation software show that TCM-Y performs significantly better than CC-MSN with respect to normalized area coverage, average distance traveled, average connectivity, and the minimum connectivity achieved by mobile nodes.