Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are re-emerging as a popular networking facility for wireless device users. A growing number of diversified applications are now accessible via wireless devices. The different applications may have different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, which may better be satisfied by using different routing methods or metric types. Existing ad hoc network routing solutions do not consider various application-level requirements when making a routing decision. They typically make routing decisions based upon limited information acquired at the network layer. Most of the existing routing protocols make use of a single routing metric. Using a single metric type and/or information, only acquired at the network layer may not be able to accommodate different QoS requirements, imposed by diversified user-level applications or application-level data types.The aim of this thesis is to design an efficient routing function for ad hoc networks while at the same time satisfying users‟ and/or applications‟ QoS and security requirements. To achieve this, the thesis investigates and specifies routing requirements that could best support application-level QoS and security requirements in MANETs. It also investigates and critically analyses the state of the art in MANET routing, and the mechanisms used for protecting the routing functions. To overcome the weaknesses and advance the state of the art in MANET routing, this thesis proposes two major solutions. The first solution is the Secure ETX (SETX) routing protocol. It is a secure routing solution that can provide routing functions efficiently in malicious MANET environment. The SETX protocol provides a security mechanism to counter black hole attacks in MANETs on the ETX metric acquisition process. Simulation studies have been carried out and discussed in the thesis. Simulation results show that the SETX protocol can provide a marked improvement in network performances in the presence of black hole attacks, and it can do so with a negligible level of additional overhead.The second solution is a novel routing decision making called the Flexible Routing Decision (FRD) framework. The FRD framework supports routing decision making by using multiple metric types (i.e. multi-criteria routing decision making) and uses a cross-layer approach to support application-level QoS requirements. This allows users to use different routing metrics types, making the most appropriate routing decision for a given application. To accommodate the diversified application-level QoS requirements, multiple routing metric types have been identified and interpreted in the FRD framework design. The FRD framework has overcome some weaknesses exhibited by existing single metric routing decision making, used in MANETs. The performance of a routing decision making of FRD is also evaluated using NS2 simulation package. Simulation results demonstrate that the FRD framework outperforms the existing routing decision making methods.

An Ad Hoc network is a wireless network without any stationary infrastructure of any kind. The nodes should be able to communicate with each other using wireless links, where a packet might traverse multiple links from the source to the destination. Every node in the network acts as a router, forwarding packet from one node to another. Since Ad Hoc networks are wireless and the nodes often battery driven, it is very important that the routing protocol in use can handle a large degree of node mobility and at the same time be very energy efficient. This is not an easy thing and a numerous routing protocols for wireless Ad Hoc networks have been proposed. Our goal was to simulate and make a literature study of three completely different routing protocols for wireless Ad Hoc networks: the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR), the Topology Dissemination Based on Reverse-Path Forwarding protocol (TBRPF), and the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP).

Thesis (MScEng (Electrical and Electronic Engineering))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / Please refer to full text for abstract.

Despite recent advances in wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies, today's WLANs still cannot offer the same data rates as their wired counterparts. The throughput problem is further aggravated in multi-hop wireless environments due to collisions and interference caused by multi-hop routing. Because all current IEEE 802.11 physical (PHY) standards divide the available frequency into several orthogonal channels, which can be used simultaneously within a neighborhood, increasing capacity by exploiting multiple channels becomes particularly appealing. To improve the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks by exploiting multiple available channels, I propose three principles that facilitate the design of efficient distributed channel assignment protocols. Distributed channel assignment problems have been proven to be <i>NP</i>-complete and, thus, computationally intractable. Though being a subject of many years of research, distributed channel assignment remains a challenging problem. There exist only a few heuristic solutions, none of which is efficient, especially for the mobile ad hoc environment. However, protocols that implement the proposed design principles are shown to require fewer channels and exhibit significantly lower communication, computation, and storage complexity, compared with existing approaches. As examples, I present two such protocols that build on standard reactive and proactive routing protocols. In addition, I prove the correctness of the algorithms and derive an upper bound on the number of channels required to both resolve collisions and mitigate interference. A new multi-channel medium access control (MC-MAC) protocol is also proposed for multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks. MC-MAC is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) standard and imposes the minimum system requirements among all existing multi-channel MAC protocols. In addition, simulation results show that even with only a single half-duplex transceiver, MC-MAC, by exploiting multiple channels, can offer up to a factor of four improvement in throughput over the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The reduction in delay is even more significant. Therefore, the MC-MAC protocol and the accompanying distributed channel assignment protocols constitute an effective solution to the aforementioned performance problem in a multi-hop wireless network. Finally, I generalize the cross-layer design principle to more general networking functions and present a network architecture to motivate and facilitate cross-layer designs in wireless networks. A literature survey is provided to validate the proposed cross-layer design architecture. Current cross-layer design research can be categorized into two classes: joint-layer design using optimization techniques, and adaptive techniques based on system-profile and/or QoS requirements. Joint-layer design based on optimization techniques can achieve optimal performance, but at the expense of complexity. Adaptive schemes may achieve relatively good performance with less complexity. Nevertheless, without careful design and a holistic view of the network architecture, adaptive schemes may actually cause more damage than benefit. / Ph. D.