Improving ad hoc network performance with backbone topology control

An important means to provide connectivity in areas where no access point is directly available is ad hoc networking. However, situations may occur where the connectivity of a set of nodes cannot be guaranteed (if they are too far apart); moreover, no QoS can be offered since the number of hops and the signal quality (thus the throughput) cannot be controlled. Therefore, we propose to deploy a controlled backbone in the ad hoc environment using movable mobile routers. This paper concentrates on two fundamental problems: on the one hand, global connectivity of the network is investigated, and on the other hand, we elaborate mechanisms that allow QoS support by setting an upper bound on the number of wireless hops. We describe the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models for these deployment policies with respect to the constraints within these environments. Our approach suggested for backbone topology control allows one to achieve an efficient usage of resources.