Location-Aware Cluster-Based Routing Protocol Design for Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless networking offers freedom moving around the effective transmission area and the flexibility and easy to use function for Internet application. The advancement in wireless communication and portable computing devices has made mobile computing possible. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an infrastructureless network with no fixed routers, hosts, or wireless base stations. Nodes of these networks function as routers, which discover and maintain routes to other nodes in the network. Routing protocols used in conventional wired networks are not suited to the mobile environment due to the considerable overhead produced by periodic route update messages and their slow convergence to topological changes. In ad hoc wireless networks, energy is a nonrenewable resource that a mobile node has a finite, monotonically decreasing energy store. These networks are power constrained because nodes operate with restricted battery power. Energy consumption at the network interface is an issue for all mobile computing devices. To minimize energy consumption in portable communication devices has been one of the major design goals for wireless networks. Minimum energy network design can allow longer battery life and mitigate interference. A network protocol that minimizes energy consumption is a key to low-power wireless networks.
The limitation of bandwidth and energy are two challenges facing the design of wireless networks. Clustering enables bandwidth reuse and can, thus, increase system capacity. Cluster-based routing protocol enables better resource allocation and helps to improve power control and system lifetime. It will also enable the cluster heads to pre-process, aggregate and compress their data stream that further reducing energy dissipation. Recently, location-based routing protocol has obtained more attractive. Instead of searching route in the entire network blindly, location-based routing protocol using the location information of mobile nodes to confine the route searching space into a smaller estimated range. The smaller route searching space to be search, the less routing overhead and broadcast storm problem will be induce.
In this dissertation, we propose some location-aided cluster-based routing protocols, which use geographical location information provided by positioning device in route discovery and route maintenance procedure. In our protocols, the whole network is partitioned into clusters. The path is constructed in a cluster-by-cluster basis. The performances of our algorithms were studied through extensive simulation. The simulation results reveal that our protocols have outstanding performance.

Keywords: Routing Protocol, Location-Aware, Ad hoc Networks, Sensor Networks