An adaptive hello process for overhead reduction in MANETs

In mobile ad hoc network (MANET) for effective routing neighbor discovery and route maintenance is an important process. Neighbor discovery used to find the neighbor nodes inside the coverage region of active nodes. It is initialized by every node which exists in the network. Normally neighbor nodes are discovered by HELLO protocol. In self organizing wireless network HELLO protocol is very important. Additional packets in the network result in routing overhead, which is necessary for a proper session, but decreases the performance of the routing protocol. We focus on reducing the overhead to improve the protocol performance. In the existing hello process, all the nodes exchange hello packets with their neighbors with a fixed interval. Due to the uncertainty and irregularity of the mobile network parameters, the interval of hello packet emission should be determined dynamically. Our proposed hello process allows only the members of the active route and their neighbors to exchange hello packets. The interval of hello packet transmission is computed by each node, independent of others, based on the current number of neighbor table entries. The simulation is done in ns2.34 and Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is used for the implementation of the proposed scheme. The routing overheads obtained by the proposed and existing hello processes are compared to show a high reduction in routing overhead by the proposed one.