Sector Based Clustering & Routing

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to provide a new secure and efficient protocol for clustering and routing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. The existing protocols for MANET have poor performance when the power and security attributes are considered. A new protocol that would take these two attributes along with performance into consideration is required. In our approach the concept of sectors is introduced to the clustering and routing process. The concept of sectors facilitates in the cluster head election process and also sets an upper limit on the number of members a cluster can have. In Sector Based Routing the route discovery mechanism chooses routes in a controlled way using the concept of sectors. The multiple paths help in reducing the power consumption and increase the security of data being transmitted. Simulations were performed on the OSU Computer Science Department Sun Blade 150 server. The simulator was specially designed and programmed to simulate and compare the proposed Sector Based Clustering and Routing (SBCR) algorithms along with Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Cluster Based Routing (CBR) protocols. Two types of simulations were performed on the three protocols. One simulation tested the survivability of the network whereas the other observed the behavior of the protocol over a long period of time. The proposed protocol increases the survivability of the network, improves the performance, as well as security. The results suggest that as the node density increases, our proposed sector based clustering and routing outperforms AODV and CBR. Additional simulation results were also collected to observe the behavior of SBCR, with an increase in the number of sectors. As the number of sectors was increased the performance of the network improved.