Performance Improvements in Ad Hoc Networks Through Mobility Groups and Channel Diversity

The physical characteristics of device mobility in many different circumstances often suggest the logical grouping of nodes that move together. The use of mobility group protocols, treating groups of devices as ad hoc networks with a node elected as the gateway, can lead to significant performance gains. However, the addition of ad hoc networks can lead to starvation and fairness problems. Multichannel diversity schemes can be used to mitigate these effects. The main contribution of this work is the design and analysis of a combined routing group formation and multi-channel diversity algorithm. We show that, used independently, our routing group protocol and the multi-channel diversity scheme do not perform well in one or more of the metrics tested. However, when combined, the schemes complement each other, and effectively increase performance across all metrics. Our analysis is performed through extensive simulation using a recently proposed group mobility model and shows a number of new results for routing group protocols and multi-channel diversity schemes.