All Published Papers Search Service

Title

A virtual subnet protocol for mobile ad hoc networks using forwarding cache scheme

Author

Tzu-Chiang Chiang, Ching-Hung Yeh, Yueh-Min Huang

Vol. 6  No. 1  pp. 108~115

Abstract

The Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) technology is one of the hottest areas of networking systems. A VLAN is a logical connection rather than physical that allows network devices to be combined as “virtual LANs”. The VLAN technology functions by logically segmenting the network into different broadcast domains so that packets can only be delivered between ports with the same VLAN identity (group member). By using this characteristic of a VLAN there is a very flexible mechanism to group the physical ports together. Wireless networks also need the flexibility to collect more than two devices equipped with wireless communication and networking capability. In recent years, wireless network has been attracting a lot of attentions as wireless devices have enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity. In order to communicate among some groups of wireless devices without the conventional concept of clusters, we propose a novel model to form a multiple-domain or a multiple-group as “virtual LANs” borrowing from the logical connection in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we also propose a novel forwarding cache VLAN protocol (FCVP) for ad hoc networks to simulate the behavior of a VLAN in an ad hoc network. For our purpose, each node in an ad hoc network records the nodes of the same VLAN identity in a cache table to keep the information of the VLAN identification for forwarding the packets. We simulate the proposed protocol in the ad hoc network environment between 50 and 80 nodes with different sizes of VLAN groups. The result shows that the throughput of our protocol delivering packets to all nodes in the same VLAN group is more than 84% efficient. Furthermore, when compared to flooding, the efficiency of communication improves up to 68% on our FCVP.

Keywords

Virtual Local Area Network, wireless networks, ad hoc networks, multiple-group

URL