An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. In such an environment, it may be necessary for one mobile host to enlist the aid of other hosts in forwarding a packet to its destination, due to the limited range of each mobile host’s wireless transmissions. This paper presents a protocol for routing in ad hoc networks that uses dynamic source routing. The protocol adapts quickly to routing changes when host movement is frequent, yet requires little or no overhead during periods in which hosts move less frequently. Based on results from a packet-level simulation of mobile hosts operating in an ad hoc network, the protocol performs well over a variety of environmental conditions such as host density and movement rates. For all but the highest rates of host movement simulated, the overhead of the protocol is quite low, falling to just 1 % of total data packets transmitted for moderate movement rates in a network of 24 mobile hosts. In all cases, the difference in length between the routes used and the optimal route lengths is negligible, and in most cases, route lengths are on average within a factor of 1.01 of optimal. 1.

When n identical randomly located nodes, each capable of transmitting at bits per second and using a fixed range, form a wireless network, the throughput @ A obtainable by each node for a randomly chosen destination is 2 bits per second under a noninterference protocol. If the nodes are optimally placed in a disk of unit area, traffic patterns are optimally assigned, and each transmission’s range is optimally chosen, the bit–distance product that can be transported by the network per second is 2 @ A bit-meters per second. Thus even under optimal circumstances, the throughput is only 2 bits per second for each node for a destination nonvanishingly far away. Similar results also hold under an alternate physical model where a required signal-to-interference ratio is specified for successful receptions. Fundamentally, it is the need for every node all over the domain to share whatever portion of the channel it is utilizing with nodes in its local neighborhood that is the reason for the constriction in capacity. Splitting the channel into several subchannels does not change any of the results. Some implications may be worth considering by designers. Since the throughput furnished to each user diminishes to zero as the number of users is increased, perhaps networks connecting smaller numbers of users, or featuring connections mostly with nearby neighbors, may be more likely to be find acceptance.

karp @ eecs.harvard.edu We present Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR), a novel routing protocol for wireless datagram networks that uses the po-sitions of touters and a packer's destination to make packet for-warding decisions. GPSR makes greedy forwarding decisions us-ing only information about a router's immediate neighbors in the network topology. When a packet reaches a region where greedy forwarding is impossible, the algorithm recovers by routing around the perimeter of the region. By keeping state only about the local topology, GPSR scales better in per-router state than shortest-path and ad-hoc routing protocols as the number of network destinations increases. Under mobility's frequent topology changes, GPSR can use local topology information to find correct new routes quickly. We describe the GPSR protocol, and use extensive simulation of mobile wireless networks to compare its performance with that of Dynamic Source Routing. Our simulations demonstrate GPSR's scalability on densely deployed wireless networks.

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Due to the limited transmission range of wireless network interfaces, multiple network "hops " may be needed for one node to exchange data with another across the network. In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols targeted specifically at this environment have been developed, but little performance information on each protocol and no realistic performance comparison between them is available. This paper presents the results of a detailed packet-level simulation comparing four multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols that cover a range of design choices: DSDV, TORA, DSR, and AODV. We have extended the ns-2 network simulator to accurately model the MAC and physical-layer behavior of the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard, including a realistic wireless transmission channel model, and present the results of simulations of networks of 50 mobile nodes. 1

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-andforward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2--6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1-10s.

In this paper we present a case for using new power-aware metrics for determining routes in wireless ad hoc networks. We present five different metrics based on battery power consumption at nodes. We show that using these metrics in a shortest-cost routing algorithm reduces the cost/packet of routing packets by 5-30% over shortest-hop routing (this cost reduction is on top of a 40-70% reduction in energy consumption obtained by using PAMAS, our MAC layer protocol). Furthermore, using these new metrics ensures that the mean time to node failure is increased significantly. An interesting property of using shortest-cost routing is that packet delays do not increase. Finally, we note that our new metrics can be used in most traditional routing protocols for ad hoc networks. 1

An ad hoc network is a group of wireless mobile computers (or nodes), in which individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other to allow nodes to communicate beyond direct wireless transmission range. Prior research in ad hoc networking has generally studied the routing problem in a non-adversarial setting, assuming a trusted environment. In this paper, we present attacks against routing in ad hoc networks, and we present the design and performance evaluation of a new secure on-demand ad hoc network routing protocol, called Ariadne. Ariadne prevents attackers or compromised nodes from tampering with uncompromised routes consisting of uncompromised nodes, and also prevents a large number of types of Denial-of-Service attacks. In addition, Ariadne is efficient, using only highly efficient symmetric cryptographic primitives.

Early simulation experience with wireless ad hoc networks suggests that their capacity can be surprisingly low, due to the requirement that nodes forward each others’ packets. The achievable capacity depends on network size, traffic patterns, and detailed local radio interactions. This paper examines these factors alone and in combination, using simulation and analysis from first principles. Our results include both specific constants and general scaling relationships helpful in understanding the limitations of wireless ad hoc networks. We examine interactions of the 802.11 MAC and ad hoc forwarding and the effect on capacity for several simple configurations and traffic patterns. While 802.11 discovers reasonably good schedules, we nonetheless observe capacities markedly less than optimal for very simple chain and lattice networks with very regular traffic patterns. We validate some simulation results with experiments. We also show that the traffic pattern determines whether an ad hoc network’s per node capacity will scale to large networks. In particular, we show that for total capacity to scale up with network size the average distance between source and destination nodes must remain small as the network grows. Non-local traffic patterns in which this average distance grows with the network size result in a rapid decrease of per node capacity. Thus the question “Are large ad hoc networks feasible?” reduces to a question about the likely locality of communication in such networks.

The Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR) is a simple and efficient routing protocol designed specifically for use in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks of mobile nodes. DSR allows the network to be completely self-organizing and self-configuring, without the need for any existing network infrastructure or administration. The protocol is composed of the two mechanisms of Route Discovery and Route Maintenance, which work together to allow nodes to discover and maintain source routes to arbitrary destinations in the ad hoc network. The use of source routing allows packet routing to be trivially loop-free, avoids the need for up-to-date routing information in the intermediate nodes through which packets are forwarded, and allows nodes forwarding or overhearing packets to cache the routing information in them for their own future use. All aspects of the protocol operate entirely on-demand, allowing the routing packet overhead of DSR to scale automatically to only that needed to react to changes in the routes currently in use. We have evaluated the operation of DSR through detailed simulation on a variety of movement and communication patterns, and through implementation and significant experimentation in a physical outdoor ad hoc networking testbed we have constructed in Pittsburgh, and have demonstrated the excellent performance of the protocol. In this chapter, we describe the design of DSR and provide a summary of some of our simulation and testbed implementation results for the protocol. 1

Abstract — Ad hoc networks are characterized by multihop wireless connectivity, frequently changing network topology and the need for efficient dynamic routing protocols. We compare the performance of two prominent ondemand routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks — Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV). A detailed simulation model with MAC and physical layer models is used to study interlayer interactions and their performance implications. We demonstrate that even though DSR and AODV share a similar on-demand behavior, the differences in the protocol mechanics can lead to significant performance differentials. The performance differentials are analyzed using varying network load, mobility and network size. Based on the observations, we make recommendations about how the performance of either protocol can be improved.