A Fault-Tolerance Cluster Head Based Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

The hierarchical routing protocols have been proposed to deal with the path search in wireless multi hop networks in various research works. Most existing designs of ad hoc network routing protocols are based on the assumption of non-adversarial environment, that every node in the network is cooperative and well behaved. However, such assumption usually does not hold in realistic environments. The performance of current routing protocols degrades significantly when misbehaving nodes exist in the network. In this paper we introduce an efficient and effective hierarchical algorithm for MANET, which is called fault-tolerance cluster head based (FTCH) routing protocol. FTCH is proposed to provide a certain packet delivery fraction guarantee and low routing overhead in the presence of faulty nodes. The FTCH routing protocol is evaluated through both analysis and simulations compared with max-min multi-hop routing protocol (MMMH), AODV and DSR. The results show that FTCH greatly improves the ad hoc routing performance in the presence of misbehaving nodes.