A mobile backbone network routing protocol with flow control

We have recently introduced a mobile backbone network based architecture to support applications transported across ad hoc wireless networks. Under our MBN topological synthesis algorithm, backbone capable nodes (BCN) are elected as backbone nodes (BN) to form a mobile backbone network (Bnet). Once constituted, the mobile backbone network provides a preferred infrastructure for supporting the transport of multimedia streams and other message flows across the ad hoc network, and is exploited to make the routing, access control and congestion control problems tractable. In this paper, a so-called mobile backbone network routing with flow control (MBNR-FC) is introduced. We define an on-demand routing protocol under which route discovery messages are distributed solely across the mobile backbone, leading to a highly scalable and robust mobile ad hoc network operation. We use the embedded signaling mechanism that is used for the route discovery process to regulate the admission of flows by guiding admitted flows through less congested areas. The employed flow control mechanism is also used to protect the quality-of-service performance of supported message flows. We show our new flow controlled based routing method to significantly improve network throughput, packet delay, packet delay jitter, and packet loss ratio performance.