Design Issues - Mobile ADHOC Networks

DESIGN ISSUES

·         The wireless link characteristics are time-varying in nature: There are transmission impediments like fading, path loss, blockage and interference that adds to the susceptible behaviour of wireless channels. The reliability of wireless transmission is resisted by different factors.

·         Limited range of wireless transmission – The limited radio band results in reduced data rates compared to the wireless networks. Hence optimal usage of bandwidth is necessary by keeping low overhead as possible.

·         Packet losses due to errors in transmission – MANETs experience higher packet loss due to factors such as hidden terminals that results in collisions, wireless channel issues (high bit error rate (BER)), interference, frequent breakage in paths caused by mobility of nodes, increased collisions due to the presence of hidden terminals and uni-directional links.

·         Route changes due to mobility- The dynamic nature of network topology results in frequent path breaks.

·         Frequent network partitions- The random movement of nodes often leads to partition of the network. This mostly affects the intermediate nodes.

·         Limited bandwidth: Wireless link continue to have significantly lower capacity than infra structured networks. In addition, the realized throughput of wireless communication after accounting for the effect of multiple access, fading, noise, and interference conditions, etc., is often much less than a radio‘s maximum transmission rate.

·         Dynamic topology: Dynamic topology membership may disturb the trust relationship among nodes. The trust may also be disturbed if some nodes are detected as compromised.

·         Routing Overhead: In wireless adhoc networks, nodes often change their location within network. So, some stale routes are generated in the routing table which leads to unnecessary routing overhead.

·         Hidden terminal problem: The hidden terminal problem refers to the collision of packets at a receiving node due to the simultaneous transmission of those nodes that are not within the direct transmission range of the sender, but are within the transmission range of the receiver.

·         Packet losses due to transmission errors: Ad hoc wireless networks experiences a much higher packet loss due to factors such as increased collisions due to the presence of hidden terminals, presence of interference, uni-directional links, frequent path breaks due to mobility of nodes.

·         Mobility-induced route changes: The network topology in an ad hoc wireless network is highly dynamic due to the movement of nodes; hence an on-going session suffers frequent path breaks. This situation often leads to frequent route changes.

·         Battery constraints: Devices used in these networks have restrictions on the power source in order to maintain portability, size and weight of the device.

·         Security threats: The wireless mobile ad hoc nature of MANETs brings new security challenges to the network design. As the wireless medium is vulnerable to eavesdropping and ad hoc network functionality is established through node cooperation, mobile ad hoc networks are intrinsically exposed to numerous security attacks.