| In the first part of our work, we present a trigger-based distributed routing (TDR) protocol for real-time QoS support in mobile ad hoc networks that takes advantage of location and mobility information of neighboring nodes to reduce nodal database overhead and control traffic compared to the other reported approaches. We demonstrate that forwarding reroute query packets along at most two downstream nodes gives the optimum performance in terms of high rerouting success and low control traffic. Two user mobility models are developed, based on which the TDR protocol performance are evaluated and compared with the existing competitive QoS routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks.; Next, we consider energy-efficient data forwarding in wireless sensor networks. We present a meshed multipath routing protocol (M-MPR) with selective random forwarding (SRF) of packets that enables the field nodes to communicate with the monitoring/control station via distributed control. Our studies show that M-MPR outperforms its equivalent disjoint multipath routing. We also show that for a given end-to-end throughput, SRF performs superior to the limited flooding approach in terms of network resource usage. With the observation that SRF along meshed multipath has better load balancing performance but its throughput performance is worse than the selective preferential forwarding (SPF) approach, we propose a new hybrid packet forwarding scheme that combines the benefits of higher throughput in SPF and better load balancing in SRF.; Finally, for studying the impact of physical and link layers on the network performance, we consider a wireless CDMA sensor network. We characterize the multiaccess interference (MAI) at a receiver for a uniformly random node distribution and study the MAI versus net work connectivity trade-off. In search for improved network performance and low-cost sensor realization, we introduce a triangular topology and compare it with two other previously-considered regular topologies (hexagonal and square grid) as well as the random topology under two receiver designs and two signature code assignments. We show that with properly chosen and maintained network topology, significant reduction in system cost can be achieved via simplified receivers and short length codes. |
