Mitigating the impact of node mobility using mobile backbone for heterogeneous MANETs

Routing in Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) has been an active research area in the past few years. It is observed that as the mobility of nodes increases, the performance of existing cluster based routing protocols tends to deteriorate rapidly. Although many mobility based clustering schemes have been proposed to address this problem, majority of these proposals assume the movement of nodes follows group mobility. In this paper, we propose a new cluster based routing protocol FASTR which utilizes mobile backbone to mitigate the impact of node mobility for networks with high node mobility and low group mobility. Our scheme eliminates the delay caused by cluster head election and enables nodes to start communication immediately after joining a cluster. Through simulation and analysis, our protocol is shown to possess good scalability, incur lower control overhead and achieve higher packet delivery ratio than existing OLSR and HOLSR routing protocols for various node mobility. Furthermore, unlike other proactive routing protocols, the control overhead of FASTR is shown to be independent of node mobility and consume less network resources than HOLSR and OLSR.