Hybrid mobile backbone network routing with flow control and distance awareness (MBNR-FC/DA)

The mobile backbone network (MBN) architecture has been introduced to synthesize robust, scalable and efficient mobile ad hoc wireless networks that support multimedia flows. Backbone capable nodes are dynamically elected to construct a mobile backbone (Bnet). In this article, we present a hybrid routing mechanism for such networks, identified as MBN routing with flow control and distance awareness (MBNR-FC/DA) scheme. Flows that travel a distance longer than a threshold level are routed across the Bnet. This induces a significant reduction in the route discovery control overhead, yielding a highly scalable operation. In turn, a limited span global route discovery process is invoked for routing shorter distance flows. Discovered global routes use effectively the capacity of non-backbone wireless links. Such an operation serves to upgrade the network’s throughput capacity level when the backbone network does not provide global topological covering. The hybrid routing protocol introduced and studied in this paper, also employs combined nodal congestion control and flow admission control schemes to guide admitted flows across areas that are less congested, and to avoid overloading the network. We present a centralized procedure as well as a distributed adaptive scheme for the calculation of the distance threshold level under varying traffic loading and backbone coverage conditions. We show our schemes to make efficient use of network-wide capacity resources by dynamically selecting proper distance threshold levels, yielding outstanding delay–throughput performance.