Modeling and simulation of routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks using colored petri nets

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), mobile nodes directly send messages to each other via wireless transmission. A node can send a message to a destination node beyond its transmission range by using other nodes as relay points, and thus a node can function as a router. Typical applications of MANETs include defense systems such as battlefield survivability, and disaster recovery. The research on MANETs originates from part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) project in the 1970s. With the explosive growth of the Internet and mobile communication networks, challenging requirements have been introduced into MANETs and designing routing protocols has become more complex. For a successful application of MANETs, it is very important to ensure that a routing protocol is unambiguous, complete and functionally correct. One approach to ensuring correctness of an existing routing protocol is to create a formal model for the protocol, and analyze the model to determine if indeed the protocol provides the defined service correctly. Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) are a suitable modeling language for this purpose, as it can conveniently express non-determinism, concurrency and different levels of abstraction that are inherent in routing protocols. However, it is not easy to build a CPN model of a MANET because a node can move in and out of its transmission range and thus the MANET's topology (graph) dynamically changes. In this paper, we proposes a topology approximation (TA) mechanism to address this problem of mobility and perform simulations of a typical routing protocol called Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV). Our simulation results show that our proposed TA mechanism can indeed mimic the dynamically changing graph (mobility) of a MANET.