PATM: Priority-Based Adaptive Topology Management for Efficient Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a distributed and adaptive topology management algorithm, called PATM (Priority-based Adaptive Topology Management), that constructs and maintains a connected backbone topology based on a minimal dominating set of the network. PATM provides a succinct presentation of the network topology to routing protocols, and therefore reduces the control overhead in routing updates. Two optimizations are proposed to further reduce the topological information exchanges among the nodes by piggybacking topology updates in packets transmitted by each node, and adaptively adjusting the topology update intervals. The efficiency of the algorithm is validated by simulations based on DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) protocol. The simulation results demonstrate that PATM not only significantly reduces the routing control overhead, but also substantially improves the network data forwarding performance.