Dense cluster gateway based routing protocol for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks

In a multi-hop mobile ad hoc network dynamic clusterization of nodes can be quite effective for better management of routing problems. In a cluster based protocol inter cluster data transfer takes place through the cluster gateways. Therefore, it is important to maintain information about the gateways as a part of the routing tables in order that the inter cluster routing proceeds smoothly even as the nodes move about. In this paper we propose a randomized approach for inter cluster routing over dense cluster gateways (DCG). A group of large number of gateway edges between two adjacent clusters offering inter cluster connectivity between the two is referred to as a DCG. The minimum number of gateway edges that define a DCG is dependent on the characteristics of particular ad hoc network. A DCG is expected to offer robust inter cluster connectivity as it typically has a large number of gateway edges. Our protocol is an improvement over the cluster based routing using k-tree core backbone proposed in [Information Processing Letters 88 (2003) 187–194]. It distributes the routing load on the cluster gateways without adding the extra overhead of maintaining information about dense cluster gateways. We also propose a heuristic which reduces the load on the cluster-heads. The heuristic elects some nodes to act as sub-cluster-heads which share a part of the workload of the respective cluster-heads. The protocol has been implemented on ns-2 simulator. An analysis of the result of the experiments has been presented.