Autonomous and fault tolerant vehicular self deployment mechanisms in MANETs

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be useful for providing network coverage in harsh and adversarial environments where nodes may become randomly or systematically disabled in disaster recovery sites or border protection zones. For these networks to be reliable and scalable, robust topology control algorithms must be developed to guide the deployment and geometric configuration of mobile nodes without a priori knowledge of the terrain. This paper studies a fault tolerant differential evolution based topology control mechanism, called TCM-Y, that directs the movements of autonomous vehicles to efficiently and dynamically deploy themselves into a uniformly dispersed configuration. TCM-Y uses a Yao graph inspired fitness function to maintain a minimum desired number of connections for a node with its neighbors while uniformly dispersing autonomous vehicles over an unknown terrain. We evaluate the performance of mobile nodes running TCM-Y in hostile environments where nodes systematically or randomly experience hostility and become disabled. Experimental results obtained from our simulation software show that mobile nodes running TCM-Y perform well in the face of neighbor losses with respect to normalized area coverage, average distance traveled, and average connectivity, while limiting the number of network partitions that may occur as a result of node failures.