On Improving the Robustness of Partitionable Internet-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Recent technological advances in portability, mobility support, and high speed wireless communications and users’ insatiable interest in accessing the Internet have fueled to development of mobile wireless networks. Internet-based mobile ad hoc network (IMANET) is emerging as a ubiquitous communication infrastructure that combines a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and the Internet to provide universal information accessibility. However, communication performance may be seriously degraded by network partitions resulted from frequent changes of the network topology. In this paper, we propose an enhanced least recently used replacement policy as a part of the aggregate cache mechanism to improve the information accessibility and reduce the access latency in the presence of network partitioning. The enhanced aggregate cache is analyzed and also evaluated by simulation. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted under various network topologies by using three different mobility models: random waypoint, Manhattan grid, and modified random waypoint. The simulation results indicate that the proposed policy significantly improves communication performance in varying network topologies, and relieves the network partition problem to a great extent.