Enabling Self-organizing Behavior in MANETs: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) require special management when compared to wired networks because of their hardware and energy limitations. A key concept that could help provide this management is Self-organization. Here the concentration is on typical MANET scenarios that depend heavily on the reliability of the network. Reliability is a direct cost of the overall network lifetime, i.e., energy of the nodes. In this paper a Self-Organizing AODV protocol (SO_AODV) has been developed by integrating self-organizing concepts found in Efficient Self-Organization Algorithm (EESOA) and Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) algorithm. SO_AODV has been compared with Traditional AODV and basic EESOA using the following metrics: network lifetime, average end to end delay, delivery ratio and convergence time. In order to appreciate the performance of the proposed SO_AODV algorithm, an implementation in the NS2 simulator is done. The observations from the simulation are: SO_AODV has better network lifetime and end to end delay than Traditional AODV and has better values of convergence time when compared to EESOA.