Analysis of Energy Conservation and Consumption Patern of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols

CHAPTER 1

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

With the advances of wireless communication technology, low-cost and powerful wireless transceivers are widely used in mobile applications. Mobile networks have attracted significant interests in recent years because of their improved flexibility and reduced costs.

Compared to wired networks, mobile networks have unique characteristics. In mobile networks, node mobility may cause frequent network topology changes, which are rare in wired networks. In contrast to the stable link capacity of wired networks, wireless lnked capacity continually varies because of the impacts from transmission power, receiver sensitivity, noise, fading and interference. Additionally, wireless mobile networks have a high error rate, power restrictions and bandwidth limitations.

Here we proceed to discuss the mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and their inherent characteristics.

1 INTRODUCTION

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a multihop wireless network of mobile nodes without any fixed infrastructure. In the absence of dedicated routers, every node contributes towards the configuration and maintenance of the routing framework.

[pic]

Figure 1: Illustration of MANET

Traditional telephone networks and cellular wireless networks are based on fixed and wired backbone infrastructure. In traditional telephone network, nodes have zero mobility whereas in cellular networks, the mobile nodes are constantly communicating with base stations, which form the wired backbone with mobile switching center. Sometimes it becomes really necessary for the mobile nodes to communicate with each other without any fixed infrastructure. Such situation can easily occur in:

□ Battlefield.

□ Emergency search and rescue operation where providing fixed infrastructure would not be possible or would be very costly.

□ Virtual classrooms or communication setup in exhibition, conference or meetings might be some other possible scenarios....