PROTOCOL SELECTOR USING MOBILE AGENT FOR ROUTING IN MANETS

Abstract

MANET is a decentralized ad-hoc network, formed of mobile nodes. There is no need of any pre-existing infrastructures for MANETs, and so it is easily deployable. Due to mobile nodes the ambience of MANET is changing time to time and that's why the routing in MANET is an intriguing work. A number of protocols have been designed for this purpose, but all of them are designed to achieve better performance for a given network scenario i.e. for a given node density or for average node mobility. Not a single routing protocol proposed so far performs optimum in all scenarios. When scenario changes protocol degrades its outcome. To overcome this, the concept of the protocol selector was introduced by [6]. Protocol selector recommends a new protocol (existing) if the scenario changes and current protocol does not fit into the new scenario. The key concept of the protocol selector is to have benefits of all the existing protocol instead of discovering a new protocol for each scenario. But the proposed protocol selector in [6] is a static selector which needs a server to perform its action. By using a server the system loses the decentralized feature of MANETs. Our work presents a protocol selector which uses mobile agent to recommend an optimum. protocol according to the current network scenario. Mobile agent moves from one node to other to calculate the required parameters for protocol selection. If it finds that the network scenario has changed and the current protocol is not suitable for new scenario. it sends beacon packets to alert the nodes of the network. The protocol selection through mobile agent gives the benefits of all existing protocol while keeping the decentralization feature of the MANETs. This report presents complete design and the simulation results of the proposed protocol selector