A stable virtual backbone for wireless MANETS
Due to the highly dynamicity and absence of a fixed infrastructure in wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), formation of a stable virtual backbone through which all the network hosts are connected is of great importance. In this paper, a learning automata-based distributed algorithm is proposed for constructing the most stable virtual backbone of the MANET. To do so, the backbone formation problem is first modeled by the stochastic version of the bounded diameter minimum spanning tree (BDMST) problem. Then, the network backbone is constructed by solving the stochastic BDMST problem for the network topology graph. Several simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the efficiency of the proposed backbone formation protocol. The obtained results are compared with those of the best existing methods. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed method over the others in terms of backbone lifetime, end-to-end delay, backbone size, packet delivery ratio, and control message overhead.
manet backbone formation bdmst problem learning automata