Load Balancing in MANET: Alleviating the center node

Abstract

Load balancing is an essential requirement of any multi-hop wireless network. A wireless routing protocol is accessed on its ability to distribute traffic over the network nodes and a good routing protocol achieves this without introducing un- acceptable delay. The most obvious benefitt is manifested in increasing the life of a battery operated node which can eventually increase the longevity of the en- tire network. In the endeavor of finding the shortest distance between any two nodes to transmit data fast the center nodes become the famous picks. The centrally located nodes connect many sub networks and serve as gateways to some sub networks that become partitioned from the rest of the network in its absence. Thus, the lifetime of the center nodes become a bottleneck for connectivity of a sub network prior to its partition from the rest of the network. An unbiased load can cause congestion in the network which impacts the overall throughput, packet delivery ratio and the average end to end delay. In, this thesis we have mitigated the unbiased load distribution on centrally located nodes by pushing traffic further to the peripheral nodes without compromising the average end to end delay for a greater network longevity and performances. We proposed a novel routing metric , load and a minimization criterion to decide a path that involves nodes with less load burden on them. The simulations of the proposed mechanism run on NS-2.34 for 16 and 50 nodes have revealed an average 2.26% reduction of load on the center node in comparison with AOMDV. . . .