Handling high mobility in next-generation wireless ad hoc networks

Next-generation ad hoc networks need to be able to handle high mobility in order to support a wide range of emerging applications such as vehicular networks. Maintaining communication links of an established communication path that extends between source and destination nodes is a significant challenge in mobile ad hoc networks due to the movement of the mobile nodes. In particular, such communication links are often broken under a high mobility environment. Although a new communication route can be established when a break in the communication path occurs, repeatedly reestablishing new routes incurs delay and substantial overhead. To address this limitation, we introduce the Virtual Router abstraction in this paper. A virtual router is a dynamically created logical router that is associated with a particular geographical area. Its routing functionality is provided by the physical nodes (i.e. mobile devices) currently within the geographical region served by the virtual router. These physical nodes take turns in forwarding data packets for the virtual router. In this environment, data packets are transmitted from a source node to a destination node over a series of virtual routers. Since virtual routers do not move, this scheme is much less susceptible to node mobility. We give simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique in handling high mobility. They show that the Virtual Router approach can achieve several times better performance than the traditional approach based on physical routers (i.e. relay nodes). Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.