Stable geographic forwarding with link lifetime prediction in mobile adhoc networks for battlefield environment

Abstract

Mobile adhoc network (MANET) is one of the most relevant areas of research in wireless communication that has gained prevalence due to its diversity over large-scale highly mobile networks to small-scale networks having low mobility and power constraints. Adhoc networks are inherently envisioned to be highly vulnerable to dynamic changes because of mobile sensor nodes. Node mobility often results in breakage of communication links, thereby introducing additional overhead for establishing new routes and transmitting table updates, further causing rapid exhaustion of energy reserve. Especially in military applications, preventing communication disruptions is an important security concern for defence applications engaged in safeguarding national boundaries. This necessitates the need for efficient routing strategy for battlefield environments susceptible to frequent link failures due to random mobility of groups/individuals. In this regard, we have proposed an efficient stable geographic forwarding with link-lifetime prediction (SGFL) that utilizes the broadcast nature of wireless channel and multicasts with node mobility. During the next hop selection process, a node preferably selects the neighbours which are at the least distance from the destination with low mobility. Unlike position based opportunistic routing, our scheme allows selection of backup node that lies within the transmission range of selected neighbours. Link lifetime prediction with backup nodes enhances efficiency and reliability of routing in highly mobile and congested adhoc networks. Simulation results show that our proposed SGFL achieves better performance than existing counterparts in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet loss and end-to-end delay under high node density as well as increased traffic flow.