Improving the topological resilience of mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

In order to effectively deploy survivability techniques to improve the resilience of mobile ad hoc networks, one must be able to identify all the weak points of the network topology. The weak or critical points of the topology are those links and nodes whose failure results in partitioning of the network. Here we propose a new algorithm based on results from algebraic graph theory, that can find the critical points in the network for single and multiple failure cases. Utilizing this algorithm we present numerical results that examine how the number of critical points varies with nodal density. Secondly, we propose three localized topological control schemes to improve the network connectivity around critical points to lessen their importance and improve the network resilience. Numerical studies to evaluate the proposed schemes under node and link failure network conditions are presented.