Evaluation of Sector-Based Routing Approach in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Infrastructure and ad hoc network architectures are the two major architectures that can use wireless networks. Unlike infrastructure architecture using the centralized base station, mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an infrastructure-less architecture which can be connected without any centralized control. In MANET, a mobile device can be connected with another device within the appropriate radio range that is typically 30 MHz to 5 GHz. Therefore, MANET is considered as a self-organizing network where each node acts as a participant and a router. Sector-based routing is a method in MANET which can be used to separate the positions of every node in a network topology. In addition, a specific node called server node can be assigned among the nodes in each sector. The server node is responsible to reserve the path resources and to maintain the information for its associated nodes and links. The performance of sector-based routing depends on the number of nodes available in the sector. Further, the routing approach in sector-based MANET can be considered in various scenarios using server nodes. Our research in this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the sector-based routing in MANET considering several scenarios. Further, we address the variation of the performance while the number of nodes changes with several routing methods in sector-based MANET. In this paper, we investigate the detailed simulation experiments on a different number of nodes and various scenarios of sector-based routing in MANET. Our findings are as follows. (1) The average collision rate is significantly lower in sector-based routing when compared to MANET. (2) The resource efficiency in sector-based routing is considerably higher. (3) Unlike in a small number of nodes, the higher number of connections can be allowed in a high number of nodes distributed in a sector.