Design and implementation of an anycast protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

This thesis conducts a detailed simulation study of stateless anycast routing in a mobile wireless ad hoc network. The developed model covers all the fundamental aspects of such networks with a routing mechanism using a scheme of orientation-dependent inter-node communication links. Using a flooding anycast mechanism, the thesis addresses another issue of locating the nearest server from a group of contents-equivalent servers in the network. The simulation model was developed in terms of a class of extended Petri nets and the simulation system Winsim is used in development and simulation to explicitly represent parallelism of events and processes in the network. The purpose of these simulations is to investigate the effect of node’s probability of changing direction, maximum speed of the node, and different TTL over the network performance under three different scenarios. In addition, the thesis provides extensive real-world experimental investigation of wireless ad hoc networks with stationary nodes in outdoor environments. The performance of wireless ad hoc networks is measured under various scenarios. For the experimental investigations, more than one network configuration and different parameters were used in real-world outdoor environment. Different sets of experiments was done to investigate the effect of inter-packet transmission time and position of laptop from the ground level to the network performance. Conducting such experiments and gathering information will provide very valuable information about wireless ad hoc networks. Thesis investigates five practically important performance metrics of a wireless mobile ad hoc network and shows the dependence of this metrics on the transmission radius, link availability, maximal possible node speed and different mobility models.