Improving Data Transmission for Collaborative Work Using Forwarding Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Environments

Mobile users are often involved in team activities and exhibit collaborative mobility in realistic ad hoc network application scenarios. Due to diverse group mobility patterns, the network may remain partitioned for extended durations. This paper describes an approach to reduce the communication disruptions by deploying forwarding nodes. The forwarding nodes explore the field periodically in orderto gather network information for countering the influence from mobility and sparseness of node deployment. By selecting the rendezvous grid pair, the forwarding nodes can move to appropriate locations to recover communication between disconnected groups. The mechanism has been implemented in the network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that the mechanism can efficiently improve information availability and also achieve the required communication quality.