Cross-layer cluster-based data dissemination for failure detection in MANETs

Node failures may be frequent in MANETs, but there can be many different causes for those failures. Nodes may lose power, crash, or simply move out of range of other nodes in the network. Identifying the root cause is complicated by a lack of fixed monitoring and analysis infrastructure. Past research has focused on monitoring using either ping, heartbeat, or gossip-based approaches, which can incur significant network wide overhead. This paper proposes a novel k-hop cluster based data dissemination scheme that can piggyback on routing messages for more efficient detection of failures including node disconnection. In this scheme, nodes forward their neighbour-hood observations to a per-cluster failure detector based on the observed spanning tree. Simulations show that detecting disconnected nodes using a cross-layer implementation of the data dissemination scheme is more efficient while an application layer implementation is faster. This effect is more pronounced in sparse networks.