Cooperative Load Balancing and Dynamic Channel Allocation for Cluster-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are becoming increasingly common, and typical network loads considered for MANETs are increasing as applications evolve. This, in turn, increases the importance of bandwidth efficiency while maintaining tight requirements on energy consumption, delay and jitter. Coordinated channel access protocols have been shown to be well suited for highly loaded MANETs under uniform load distributions. However, these protocols are in general not as well suited for non-uniform load distributions as uncoordinated channel access protocols due to the lack of on-demand dynamic channel allocation mechanisms that exist in infrastructure based coordinated protocols. In this paper, we present a lightweight dynamic channel allocation mechanism and a cooperative load balancing strategy that are applicable to cluster based MANETs to address this problem. We present protocols that utilize these mechanisms to improve performance in terms of throughput, energy consumption and inter-packet delay variation (IPDV). Through extensive simulations we show that both dynamic channel allocation and cooperative load balancing improve the bandwidth efficiency under non-uniform load distributions compared to protocols that do not use these mechanisms as well as compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol with GTS mechanism and the IEEE 802.11 uncoordinated protocol.