Nodes Density and Broadcast Management in Heterogeneous Environments of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Problem statement: The research presented in this study looks into Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) environment that has varying node densities, called heterogeneous density environment. Such environment can be roughly associated with situations varying from areas struck by disasters to normal city environments. Approach: This study improved the performance of existing MANETs routing protocols by reducing the communication overhead incurred during the route discovery process. This reduction in communication overhead is achieved by implementing a new broadcast protocol. The proposed broadcast protocol is based on the density and connectivity of the nodes and not just the number of nodes. It compared against the will known routing protocols using simulation. The simulation is conducted in three different environments: dense environment, varying dense environment, and sparse dense environment. Results: Extensive performance analysis proves the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and throughput in the three environments. In dense environments the increase in performance is obvious for packet deliver ratio which in the end translates into high throughput. The throughput is seen to be improved from the original protocol by at least 10% and this trend is also observed in other forms of environment. Conclusion: The performance of the proposed protocol has been encouraging by the fact that in the three different densities environments it has shown that there is a conspicuous increase in performance for packet delivery ratio and throughput. This illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in bandwidth utilization for data transfer in different environments.