Joint design of routing and medium access control for hybrid mobile ad hoc networks

Efficient routing and medium access control (MAC) are very important for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Most existing routing and MAC protocols consider homogeneous ad hoc networks, in which all nodes are modeled as the same, i.e., they have the same communication capabilities and characteristics. Although a homogeneous network model is simple and easy to analyze, it misses important characteristics of many realistic MANETs such as military battlefield ad hoc networks. In addition, a homogeneous ad hoc network suffers from poor performance and scalability. In many ad hoc networks, multiple types of nodes do co-exist; and some nodes have larger transmission power, higher transmission data rate, and better processing capability, are more reliable and robust than other nodes. Hence, a hybrid network model is more realistic and provides many advantages for designing better routing and MAC protocols. In this paper, we present a new routing protocol called Hybrid Routing, which is specifically designed for hybrid MANETs. In addition, a novel MAC protocol is jointly designed for hybrid MANETs. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed routing MAC protocols have very good performance.