Interest-Centric Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) pose significant shared communication medium constraints such as finite memory, number of access channels, and bandwidth to the development of effective communication protocols. Furthermore, multihop message forwarding multiplies the amount of simultaneous transmissions, which augment both channel contention and network congestion, increasing interference and reducing protocol performance. With these issues in mind, we propose a variation of MANET which we called interest-centric mobile adhoc network or simply Radnet in which every participant node implements in the network layer an Active Prefix (AP) composed of a prefix and an application interest, which the Radnet protocol uses for node identification, message addressing, probabilistic message forwarding, and name search in a distributed way. To evaluate the effectiveness of Radnets for generating lower disturbance in the shared communication medium, thus enabling resource savings, and reducing message overheads, we compared the simulated performances of Radnet protocol (RP) against those of AODV and AODV + Gossip3 (G3AODV) protocols. The results showed that RP achieved a 16 percent higher message delivery rate and one order of magnitude lower latency and message overhead for short 0.5 kB messages in scenarios with 150 mobile nodes. For 5 kB messages, however, AODV and G3AODV rarely ran until the end, due to their overwhelming message overheads, while Radnet protocol showed performances similar to that of the short message case. To evaluate the use of Radnets in practice, we ran experiments in the laboratory, including a chat application on a 20-node Radnet.