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

The random waypoint model is a commonly used mobility model in the simulation of ad hoc networks. It is known that the spatial distribution of network nodes moving according to this model is, in general, nonuniform. However, a closed-form expression of this distribution and an in-depth investigation is still missing. This fact impairs the accuracy of the current simulation methodology of ad hoc networks and makes it impossible to relate simulation-based performance results to corresponding analytical results. To overcome these problems, we present a detailed analytical study of the spatial node distribution generated by random waypoint mobility. More specifically, we consider a generalization of the model in which the pause time of the mobile nodes is chosen arbitrarily in each waypoint and a fraction of nodes may remain static for the entire simulation time. We show that the structure of the resulting distribution is the weighted sum of three independent components: the static, pause, and mobility component. This division enables us to understand how the model’s parameters influence the distribution. We derive an exact equation of the asymptotically stationary distribution for movement on a line segment and an accurate approximation for a square area. The good quality of this approximation is validated through simulations using various settings of the mobility parameters. In summary, this article gives a fundamental understanding of the behavior of the random waypoint model.

We develop an on-demand, multipath distance vector protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. Specifically, we propose multipath extensions to a well-studied single path routing protocol known as Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV). The resulting protocol is referred to as Ad hoc Ondemand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV). The protocol computes multiple loop-free and link-disjoint paths. Loopfreedom is guaranteed by using a notion of "advertised hopcount." Link-disjointness of multiple paths is achieved by using a particular property of flooding. Performance comparison of AOMDV with AODV using ns-2 simulations shows that AOMDV is able to achieve a remarkable improvement in the end-to-end delay --- often more than a factor of two, and is also able to reduce routing overheads by about 20%. 1

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 on-demand 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 similar ondemand 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.

This paper studies TCP performance in a stationary multihop wireless network using IEEE 802.11 for channel access control. We first show that given a specific network topology and flow patterns, there exists an optimal window size W # at which TCP achieves the highest throughput via maximum spatial reuse of the shared wireless channel. However, TCP grows its window size much larger than W # , leading to throughput reduction. We then explain the TCP throughput decrease using our observations and analysis of the packet loss in an overloaded multihop wireless network. We find out that the network overload is typically first signified by packet drops due to wireless link-layer contention, rather than buffer overflow-induced losses observed in the wired Internet. As the offered load increases, the probability of packet drops due to link contention also increases, and eventually saturates. Unfortunately, the link-layer drop probability is insufficient to keep the TCP window size around W # . We model and analyze the link contention behavior, based on which we propose Link RED that fine-tunes the link-layer packet dropping probability to stabilize the TCP window size around W # . We further devise Adaptive Pacing to better coordinate channel access along the packet forwarding path. Our simulations demonstrate 5% to 30% improvement of TCP throughput using the proposed two techniques.

This paper presents an enhanced random mobility model for simulation-based studies of wireless networks. Our approach makes the movement trace of individual mobile stations more realistic than common approaches for random movement. After giving a survey of mobility models found in the literature, we give a detailed mathematical formulation of our model and outline its advantages. The movement concept is based on random processes for speed and direction control in which the new values are correlated to previous ones. Upon a speed change event, a new target speed is chosen, and an acceleration is set to achieve this target speed. The principles for a direction change are similar. Moreover, we propose two extensions for modeling typical movement patterns of vehicles. Finally, we consider strategies for the nodes' border behavior (i.e., what happens when nodes move out of the simulation area) and point out a pitfall that occurs when using a bounded simulation area.

Existing works have approached the problem of reliable transport in ad-hoc networks by proposing mechanisms to improve TCP's performance over such networks. In this paper we show through detailed arguments and simulations that several of the design elements in TCP are fundamentally inappropriate for the unique characteristics of ad-hoc networks. Given that ad-hoc networks are typically stand-alone, we approach the problem of reliable transport from the perspective that it is justifiable to develop an entirely new transport protocol that is not a variant of TCP. Toward this end, we present a new reliable transport layer protocol for ad-hoc networks called ATP (ad-hoc transport protocol). We show through ns2 based simulations that ATP outperforms both default TCP and TCP-ELFN.

The vision is tantalizing: a high-performance, scalable, and widely deployed wireless Internet that facilitates services ranging from radically new and unforeseen applications to true wireless "broadband" to residences and public spaces at rates of 10s of Mb/sec. However, while high-speed wireless access is easy to achieve in an enterprise network via low-cost IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) access points, wireless technology in public spaces is in its infancy. "Hot spots" provide high-speed wireless access, but do so in very few isolated "islands" at immense costs. Likewise, while fixed wireless (e.g. LMDS) and 3G can provide ubiquitous coverage and 3G can support mobility, throughputs can often be two orders of magnitude slower than WiFi.

This paper focuses on congestion control over multihop, wireless networks. In a wireless network, an important constraint that arises is that due to the MAC (Media Access Control) layer. Many wireless MACs use a time-division strategy for channel access, where, at any point in space, the physical channel can be accessed by a single user at each instant of time. In this paper, we develop a fair hop-by-hop congestion control algorithm with the MAC constraint being imposed in the form of a channel access time constraint, using an optimization based framework. In the absence of delay, we show that this algorithm are globally stable using a Lyapunov function based approach. Next, in the presence of delay, we show that the hop-by-hop control algorithm has the property of spatial spreading. In other words, focused loads at a particular spatial location in the network get "smoothed" over space. We derive bounds on the "peak load" at a node, both with hop-by-hop control, as well as with end-to-end control, show that significant gains are to be had with the hop-by-hop scheme, and validate the analytical results with simulation.

failures and route changes happen frequently. With the assumption that all packet losses are due to congestion, TCP performs poorly in such environment. While there has been some research on improving TCP performance over MANET, most of them require feedback from the network or the lower layer. In this research, we explore a new approach to improve TCP performance by detecting and responding to out-of-order packet delivery events, which are the results of frequent route changes. In our simulation study, this approach had achieved on average 50 % performance improvement, without requiring feedback from the network or the lower layer. Categories and Subject Descriptors