Position-Based Cluster Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Some of the proposed mobile ad hoc network routing algorithms require maintaining a global network state at each node. The global state is always an approximation of the current network state due to the non-negligible delay of propagating local state. The imprecision of global state information and the high storage and communication overhead make those algorithms do not scale well. In this paper, we propose a scalable loop-free cluster routing algorithm, which requires every node to maintain only its local state and uses physical location information to assist routing. In our protocol, the whole network is partitioned into several square clusters. In each cluster, we first use a cluster head selection algorithm to select a cluster head and then use a gateway selection algorithm to select gateways. After the construction of cluster heads and gateway nodes, it uses a distributed computation to collectively utilize the most up-to-date local state information to find multicast tree in a hop-by-hop basis. The performance of our algorithm was studied through extensive simulation. The simulation results reveal that our protocol has better performance than other algorithm. Key-Words: Mobile ad hoc network, Multicasting, QoS, GPS, Position-Based Routing Protocol ‡ T. F. Shih is also with the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering China College of Marine Technology and Commerce Taipei, Taiwan 111.