ALCOMFT-TR-02-71

Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Sotiris Nikoletseas, Paul Spirakis and Christos Zaroliagis
Experimenting with Relay Protocols for Communication in Ad-hoc Mobile Networks
Patras. Work packages 2 and 5. May 2002.

Abstract: We investigate the efficiency of protocols for basic communication in ad-hoc mobile networks. All protocols are classified in the semi-compulsory, relay category according to which communication is achieved through a small team of mobile hosts, called the support, which move in a predetermined way and serves as an intermediate pool for receiving and delivering messages. We implement a new semi-compulsory, relay protocol in which the motion of the support is based on a so-called ``hunter" strategy developed for a pursuit-evasion game. We conduct an extensive, comparative experimental study of this protocol with other two existing protocols, each one possessing a different motion for its support. We considered several types of inputs, including among others two kinds of motion patterns (random and adversarial) for the mobile hosts not in the support. Our experiments showed that for all protocols the throughput scales almost linearly with the number of mobile hosts in the network, and that a small support size suffices for efficient communication. An interesting outcome is that in most cases the new protocol is inferior to the other two, although it has a global knowledge of the motion space.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-02-71.ps.gz (215 kb).