Using Assisting Nodes to Improve Data Transmission for Partitioned Networks in Mobile Ad Hoc Environments

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network consisting of a set of mobile nodes is short of any infrastructure support and central management. Due to node mobility and geographical limitations, the whole ad hoc environment could be partitioned into several networks. The involved disconnection dramatically affects data communication and information availability. However, most previous routing protocols assumed that the mobile ad hoc network was never disconnected. This paper describes an approach to recovering the disconnected mobile ad hoc networks using assisting nodes. The assisting nodes can automatically move to appropriate locations for connecting network partitions. The mechanism is distributed and self-organized, and can be integrated with other routing protocols. The mechanism has been implemented in the network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that the algorithm can both efficiently improve information availability and recover network partitions.