Effects of Mobility on Membership Estimation and Routing Services in Ad Hoc Networks

The use of MANET’s (or Mobile Ad hoc NETworks) is becoming very popular. Power efficiency is a key issue in this type of network, as mobile devices usually rely on limited power supplies. One essential service, the routing protocol, employed to discover routes between nodes in the network, can greatly affect power consumption.

Furthermore, many distributed applications require an additional membership service to keep track of the nodes that make up the system at any moment. In general, this information is not provided by routing services with the exception of the Optimised Link State Routing protocol (OLSR).

The two services, routing and membership estimation, form a basic support to build other higher–level distributed services on ad hoc networks. To decrease the over-all power consumption these services should be optimized for the intended use of the network. In particular the degree of mobility can have an impact on the power consumption and performance of different approaches to routing and membership estimation.

In this paper we present a study of two different approaches that combine a routing service with membership estimation. We compare the proactive OLSR with our own approach. Our approach consists of integrating a gossip-style failure detector with the reactive Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR).

We present an analysis of the effects of mobility on the global performance and power consumption of the two approaches. We identify scenarios for which each approach is best suited.