A Novel Spatial Property Aware Multihop Communication Solution for Autonomous Mobile Networks

Abstract

In line with traditional communication systems, more and more attention is given to autonomous, self-organized networks with no central infrastructure, based on peer-to-peer communication. Designing multihop broadcast protocols for these networks is a complex problem as the task of these protocols is to disseminate messages in a network effectively while avoiding unnecessary use of resources. The vast majority of these protocols (as those used in the present day Internet) do not use spatial information of the nodes to optimize the bandwidth and channel usage. By increasing the awareness of the nodes, equipping them with their physical location, we can achieve a higher level of autonomous functioning, better performance, and higher level communication primitives, like transmitting in a given direction. We have designed a novel communication protocol, based on the spatial properties of the system, the Direction Based Handshake Gossiping, which was implemented in our self-organizing network simulator. For performance comparison we picked three other location based data dissemination protocols from the literature (Distance Adaptive Dissemination, the General Probabilistic Broadcast Algorithm, and Ni et al's location-based scheme). Our simulations show that our solution overperforms the other three protocols in terms of control overhead and number of duplications, which is crucial in self-organized mobile networks, where radio band with and energy are usually scarce resources.