Improving the Dominating-Set Routing over Delay-Tolerant Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks via Estimating Node Intermeeting Times

Abstract

With limited coverage of wireless networks and frequent roaming of mobile users, providing a seamless communication service poses a technical challenge. In our previous research, we presented a supernode system architecture that employs the delay-tolerant network (DTN) concept to provide seamless communications for roaming users over interconnected heterogeneous wireless networks. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are considered a key component of the supernode system for services over an area not covered by other wireless networks. Within the super node system, a dominating-set routing technique is proposed to improve message delivery over MANETs and to achieve better resource utilization. The performance of the dominating-set routing technique depends on estimation accuracy of the probability of a future contact between nodes. This paper studies how node mobility can be modeled and used to better estimate the probability of a contact. We derive a distribution for the node-to-node intermeeting time and present numerical results to demonstrate that the distribution can be used to improve the dominating-set routing technique performance. Moreover, we investigate how the distribution can be employed to relax the constraints of selecting the dominating-set members in order to improve the system resource utilization.