Hierarchical Cluster Based Routing for Highly Mobile Heterogeneous MANET

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has been a research area of interests in the past few years. Many protocols have been proposed. In recent years, the fast development in wireless communication technology has triggered the emergence of new generations of mobile devices with multiple wireless interfaces of heterogeneous technology. Since the performance of MANET routing protocols tends to decreases rapidly as the mobility of nodes increases, it is desirable to investigate how to utilize such rich connectivity and physical heterogeneity to improve the routing performance under high node mobility. In this paper, we propose a novel two-layer hierarchical cluster based routing protocol for highly mobile heterogeneous MANET. We attempt to mitigate the impact of rapid topology change by exploiting the node heterogeneity and organizational structure of clusters. Simulation shows that our protocol has better performance and lower overhead compared to existing hierarchical protocols such as HOLSR.