Message Cab (MCab): Partition Restoration in MANETs Using Flexible Helping Hosts

Helping hosts are intensively used in various schemes to restore partitioned Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Most of the existing schemes offers only deterministic deployment and fixed routes for the helping hosts, and are thus not able to deal with fluctuating network traffic, which is a practical condition in many MANET applications. In this paper, we argue that flexible helping hosts (referred to as Message Cabs (MCabs)), with deployment and routes that response to the changes in the traffic demand of the network, may overcome this drawback and reduce the message delay in the networks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this observation, we propose a new helping host scheme namely the Message Cab (MCab) scheme for partition restoration in MANETs, and validate the performance through simulations.