Towards an efficient failure detection in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are characterized by a dynamic topology and generally deployed in a hostile environment with limited resources. As a result, the nodes are more vulnerable and are often subject to failures. Therefore, the design of an efficient failure detector in MANETs is a very challenging issue as the detection is proved to be unreliable. Such an achievement amounts to balance between the performances of the accuracy, the completeness and the resource consumption. We present and discuss in this paper a solution for an efficient failure detection in MANETs. This new protocol, called efficient failure detection for MANETs, exploits different mechanisms to improve the completeness and the accuracy of the detection while reducing the traffic overhead. The number of used timers are limited to two for each node thus reducing the complexity of the algorithm. The simulations performed on NS2 platform show the efficiency of efficient failure detection for MANETs comparing with other protocols. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.