Understanding the interactions between unicast and group communications sessions in ad hoc networks

Abstract

In this paper, our objective is to study and understand the mutual effects between the group communication protocols and unicast sessions in mobile ad hoc networks. The motivation of this work is based on the fact that a realistic wireless networks would typically have to support different simultaneous network applications, many of which may be unicast but some of which may need broadcast or multicast. However, almost all of the prior work on evaluating protocols in ad hoc networks examine protocols in isolation. In this paper, we compare the interactions of broadcast/multicast and unicast protocols and understand the microscopic nature of the interactions. We find that unicast sessions are significantly affected by the group communication sessions. In contrast, unicast sessions have less influence on the performance of group communications due to redundant packet transmissions provided by the latter. We believe that our study is a first step towards understanding such protocol interactions in ad hoc networks. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.