Design of a resource advertisement and discovery protocol for large and dense manets

Abstract

With remarkable advances in wireless technologies, applications of mobile ad hoc networks will be in widespread use in the near future. Thus, the geographical network environments may become large and dense. In such network environments, a large number of resource discovery queries may be generated when specific resources or services are needed. In order to effectively utilize the limited bandwidth of the networks, and reduce power used by mobile devices, the design for resource discovery protocols should take both the operational cost and the network performance into account. Moreover, the results of resource discoveries may further be used in later route discovery processes of certain ad hoc routing protocols. In this paper we propose a simple resource advertisement and discovery (SRAD) protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. The SRAD protocol self‐organizes a proximity network and works in a fully distributed architecture without centralized control or management to prevent performance bottleneck. In addition, a resource description and management scheme is also devised to share loads among mobile nodes. The simulation results show that the SRAD protocol can achieve the same level of performance as in broadcast‐based protocols while generating fewer transmitted messages in large and dense mobile ad hoc networks.