Design and performance analysis of leader election and initialization protocols on ad hoc networks

Leader election and initialization are two fundamental problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The leader can serve as a coordinator in the MANETs and the initialization protocol can assign each host a sequential, unique, and short IDž. Q1 As we know, nož research on initialization for IEEE Q2 802.11-based MANETs has been done. Here, we propose two contention-based leader election and initialization protocols for IEEE 802.11-based single-hop MANETs. We also provide an efficient approach to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocols, such that the performance can be evaluated in polynomial time. The evaluation results provide a guideline to set the size of the contention window and thus improve the performance of the proposed leader election and initialization protocols. The results can also be used as a guideline to set the size of the contention window for any contention-based protocol. Simulation results justify that the evaluation results provide a good guideline to set the size of the contention window. Copyright  2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.