Content uploaded by Mahdi Abdulkader
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Mahdi Abdulkader on Jul 16, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Vol. 7, No. 5, 2016
249 | P a g e
www.ijacsa.thesai.org
Efficient Load Balancing Routing Technique for
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Mahdi Abdulkader Salem
Department of Computer Sciences & Information
Technology Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture,
Technology & Sciences, Allahabad India
Raghav Yadav
Department of Computer Science & Information
Technology Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture,
Technology & Sciences, Allahabad India
Abstract—The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is nothing
but the wireless connection of mobile nodes which provides the
communication and mobility among wireless nodes without the
need of any physical infrastructure or centralized devices such as
access point or base station. The communication in MANET is
done by routing protocols. There are different categories of
routing protocols introduced with different goals and objectives
for MANETs such as proactive routing protocols (e.g. DSDV),
reactive routing protocols (e.g. ADOV), geographic routing
protocols (e.g. GRP), hybrid routing protocols etc. There are two
important research problems with such routing protocols to
address such as efficient load balancing and energy efficiency. In
this paper, we are focusing on evaluation and analysis of efficient
load balancing protocol design for MANET. Inefficient load
balancing technique results in increasing routing overhead, poor
packet delivery ratio, and other Quality of Service (QoS)
parameters. In literature, there are a number of different
methods proposed for improving the performance of routing
protocols by efficient load balancing among mobile nodes
communication. However, most of the methods suffer from
various limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel technique
for improved the QoS performance of load balancing approach
as well as increasing the network lifetime. Evaluation of Network
lifetime is out of scope of this paper.
Keywords—AODV; MANET; Load balancing; throughput;
packet delivery ratio; routing overhead
I. INTRODUCTION
The term MANET (mobile ad hoc network) is defined as
the wireless autonomous network in which nodes get
connected by wireless links without using any physical
infrastructure. MANET is a temporary network. Each node in
MANET acts as both data sender or receiver and data
forwarder in particular direction selected by routing protocol.
All mobile nodes in network move randomly within a specific
network area. Battlefield is one of the main area where
MANET is widely used. For intercommunication purpose,
such kind of networks do not need any extra support in the
form of base stations or access points. Therefore, it is a total
dynamic and infrastructure-free network. MANET network is
nothing but a group of radio devices in which wireless
communication is executed without any fixed physical
foundation. The communication between the source mobile
node and destination mobile node is not direct, but rather is
carried by using intermediate nodes according to multi-hop
communication approach. Direct communication can only be
possible among neighboring nodes.
The mobile nodes in MANET are located randomly and
continuously changing their positions in network. Thus, the
interconnections among mobile nodes are also changing
frequently. Such networks are thus self-organizing and self-
configuring and one does not require central management for
configuration purpose. In MANET, all nodes can
communication each other using the wireless links. Due to the
characteristics of MANET like allowing access to servies
anywhere, anytime ubiquitously without need of any physical
devices or platform, it is mainly used in crisis management
services, military areas, conference halls, classrooms, etc.
Development of multimedia applications like video
conferencing and video on demand is possible only because of
ad hoc networking developments of MANETs.
The communication in MANETs is possible due to use of
routing protocols which help to discover the communication
paths, select the paths, forward data on current paths, maintain
the routes, and handle frequent changes in routes due to
frequent nodes movements. The traditional and existing routing
protocols did not addressed the issues related to QoS (Quality
of Service). QoS is nothing but the level of performance of
particular routing protocol of service providing to network end
users. Many real time applications especially multimedia
programs having the QoS requirements which must be
achieved. The basic aim of QoS solutions is to get the
improved deterministic behaviour of network with the
objective of delivering the data carried by wireless network
rightly, and utilization of network resources should be efficient.
However, there is still the research challenge of maintaining
the QoS solutions according to end users mobility. Many of the
existing routing protocols presented so far for MANET are
targeted either at minimizing the data traffic in wireless
network or at reducing the number of hops taken to deliver
packets.
The main reason of not providing the QoS solutions with
existing routing protocols is that they are not designed with
load balancing approach to cope with diver’s conditions of
MANET, mobility, data traffic, etc. For Mobile ad hoc
networks, one of the important problem is load balancing. As
we discussed earlier in this paper, the existing routing protocols
do not have the processing of dealing with load balancing in
MANET. Therefore, since the last two decades, a number of
methods have been designed for load balancing in routing
protocols. Due to emerging application requirements and also
for reliable data transfer, load balancing is one of the key
research areas in the field of MANETs. In MANETs, task
(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Vol. 7, No. 5, 2016
250 | P a g e
www.ijacsa.thesai.org
finishing in particular is more complex if there is more traffic
on mobile nodes with minimized processing capacity. There is
no special technique for load sharing. Non-uniform processing
or computing power of systems resulted in load imbalance in
MANET. Sometimes, certain nodes in the network are
overloaded and some nodes are completely idle. The mobile
node with better processing capabilities can complete its tasks
in quick time. Such nodes are treated that it does not load or
less load all the time. Therefore, situation of nodes with less
load are keep idle, and requirement of over loaded mobile
nodes is objectionable.
Many routing approaches have been developed for load
balancing in MANETs. Major research work is carried out by
approaching the load balancing problem through congestion
estimation and traffic control. Some approaches are used in
energy and power metrics for making routing decision for load
balancing. Clustering-based approaches also exist. Very few
literatures use queue size, hop count, and bandwidth metrics
for load balancing in mobile ad hoc networks. However, for
MANET, there are two research challenges such as QoS
improvement and energy efficiency. These two points were not
efficiently addressed by existing methods. Therefore, it
becomes a motivation for this research paper to present novel
hybrid approach for load balancing in MANET with goal of
improving QoS performance and energy efficiency
performance.
The main goal of this paper is thus to present novel
algorithm for efficient load balancing technique. This proposed
method should address both load balancing and energy
efficiency parallel. The proposed method has two important
features such as method of link estimation proposed for energy
efficiency improvement and another is learning of network
load balancing in order to achieve the improved QoS solutions.
These two contribution points are combined together in order
to achieve both energy efficiency and improved QoS
performance. However, in this paper, we keep the scope
particularly with evaluation of QoS performance of efficient
load balancing technique. Energy efficiency is out of scope of
this paper. The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
section II presents the related work studies over different load
balancing techniques with analysis. Section III presents an
overview of proposed framework, algorithm steps and design.
Section IV presents the simulation studies and results achieved
with different network conditions. Finally Section V presents
the conclusion and discusses future work.
II. RELATED WORK
In [1], the authors Yin and Lin presented the MALB
technique which is based on multipath communication load
balancing approach. For every discovered path, this protocol
iteratively tracking the current traffic rate. The tracking of
traffic rate is done for reducing the end-to-end delay
performance in network.
In [2], authors present another technique which is based on
similar approach presented in [1] for multipath communication
based protocol.
In [3], authors Wu and Harms introduce the communication
among the 2 node disjoint routes as the number paths among
the nodes on different routes. From the practical analysis and
results of this method, it can be seen that increasing the
correlation results in increasing end to end delay for two
numbers of paths. Therefore, to decrease this end to end delay
performance, another approach is introduced in which traffic
balancing is done around the least correlated routes.
In [4], [5], [6], different uni path based load balancing
techniques are proposed by authors. In [4], various routing
metrics are considered. In [5], packet caching approach is
adopted. In [6], directional antennas approach is used.
In [7], the authors Zhu and Hassanein propose the new load
balancing routing method known as LBAR. This protocol
considers the nodal activity for routing metric from the total
number of valid routes.
In [8], authors Lee and Riley presented approach for
overloaded mobile nodes in which it is presented that such
nodes would have freedom to forbidding the extra
communications in order to make them load free by solving
their overloaded condition. Therefore, every mobile device of
MANET having the specific threshold value for making the
decision on receipt of RREQ messages. There are number of
other articles presented in which comparative study among
multi path and single path load balancing techniques is
discussed. Practically, the multipath-based load balancing
methods providing the various benefits for improving the fault
tolerance as well as reliability. However, it is showing that in
[9], single path based techniques claim to be more efficient for
load balancing.
In [9], author Pearlman, et al. introduced an approach for
multipath-based routing method which is efficient if the
alternate routes are disjoint. However, this is not simple to
achieve in MANETs [10]. In [11], author Ganjali and
Keshavarzian proposed that under any MANET with large
number of mobile nodes the approach of multipath
communication can address the load balancing more efficiently
as compared to single path routing approach if there are huge
number of routes utilized among all source and destination
pairs.
In [12], the authors presented the performance evaluation
multipath routing approach and reactive routing approach with
load balancing technique.
In [13], author of this paper proposed method of load
balancing in which number of realistic parameters like battery
powers of every node, processing capabilities of every node,
communication cost required for transferring the loads from
overloaded nodes to under loaded mobile nodes.
In [14], author Saigal, et al. introduced another load
balancing technique for MANET called as LARA (load aware
routing in ad hoc). In this protocol, traffic density metric is
utilized for presenting the contention degree at MAC layer.
During the process of route setup, traffic density parameter is
utilized for selecting the communication path with less traffic
load.
In [15], the authors presented the details on selecting the
right trade off among improved performance and increased
routing overheads.
(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Vol. 7, No. 5, 2016
251 | P a g e
www.ijacsa.thesai.org
In [16], authors present the new technique for achieving the
both improved reliability in case of path failures as well as
multipath based load balancing routing in MANETs. This
paper achieves the objectives through full use of multiple paths
in MANETs to solve frequent paths failures problems as well
as load balancing problem.
In [17], authors Chakrabarti and Kulkarni present an
approach for designing the alternate paths that are maintained
as well as used in the DSR protocol. This method also provides
the QoS solutions by ensuring the proper bandwidth for data
transfer even if mobile nodes are under the mobility.
In [18], Souinli, et al. introduced another technique of load-
balancing which push data traffic from the network center.
This approach delivered the new routing parameters which
consider the mobile nodes centrality degree for reactive as well
as proactive routing methods.
In [19], author Pham, et al. presented the multihop wireless
communication networks in which IGW (internet gateway)
method is used for providing the internet connectivity, wireless
network linking with global Internet. However, for taking the
benefits of capacity generated through the multiple gateways,
routing protocol presented in [19] is required to balance the
load efficiently between all the available IGWs in order to
achieve the optimized network performance.
In [20], the authors Yoo, et al. introduced the load
balancing technique called SLBA means simple load balancing
approach. This method can easily added to any existing routing
protocols (reactive only). This SLBA method reduces the
traffic concentration by enabling every node for dropping the
RREQ packets or for giving up the packet forwarding.
In [21], author Khamayseh, et al. presented a novel MLR
(Mobility and Load aware Routing) method for reducing the
impacts of broadcasting problem. Flooding process is
controlled by MLR method by restricting messages of
rebroadcast based on less speed as well as less loaded mobile
nodes. In this method every mobile node takes decision on
received RREQ message depending on number of parameters
such as routing load, speed etc.
In [22], authors Cheng, et al. presented approach for
formulating problem of dynamic load balanced clustering into
the problem of dynamic optimization. To solve this problem,
author presented the different types of dynamic genetic
algorithms in MANETs.
III. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
The flowchart in Figure 1 is showing the simulation work
flow and comparative study parameters. To address the
problem of achieving both efficient load balancing and energy
efficiency we design and proposed novel algorithm called
EELAR (energy efficient load aware routing) in which both
factors traffic on mobile nodes and energy level of mobile
nodes considered while communication. Algorithm 1 is our
proposed algorithm.
Fig. 1. Flowchart of simulation work
Algorithm 1: EELAR Method
Inputs:
Routing Table Entry,
packet p,
node ID,
Set energy threshold,
Set load threshold values.
Step 1: Extract the current packet details
Step 2: Define the routing table pointer
Step 3: Extracting the Destination Area (DA) by computing
the depth from sink node
Step 4: Extracting the Forwarding Area (FA) by computing
the sink node neighbours
Step 5: Finding the shortest path from source to destination
Step 6: Update routing table entries
Step 7: Apply Energy Efficiency function
7.1.: Before starting data transfer, convert all nodes except
source node into the sleep state
(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Vol. 7, No. 5, 2016
252 | P a g e
www.ijacsa.thesai.org
7.2. If source node is ready to send data on selected active
paths, then convert all nodes into active state from sleep state.
Step 8: Apply Load balancing function for data forwarding
Step 9: If energy level of any node goes below threshold or
load on node goes particular threshold, then finds another
alternate path in order to balance load or improved the network
lifetime performance.
Step 10: If any node detects all its lower depth nodes below
current threshold value, then it calculates new threshold and,
start sending data on those paths again.
Step 11: Repeat this process still to the simulation ends.
Step 12: Stop.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A. Network Configurations
For practical work analysis, we used Network Simulator
(NS2). In NS2, we implemented and evaluated the proposed
EELAR protocol for comparative study purpose against
existing AODV and EAODV routing protocols. This
simulation is done on Ubuntu operating system and using NS-
2.34 version. The performance of routing protocols evaluation
is done based on various network scenarios and data
communication approaches under the various network
conditions. For this simulation study we have used two main
parameters such as varying mobility speed and varying number
of mobile nodes in network. We have designed two different
network scenarios for evaluating the performance of proposed
protocol which is named as EELAR. Tables 1 and 2 show the
other configuration parameters used.
TABLE I. SIMULATION CONFIGURATION FOR SCENARIO 1-VARYING
MOBILITY SPEED
Number of Nodes
50
Traffic Patterns
CBR (Constant Bit Rate)
Network Size (X * Y)
1000 x 1000
Simulation Time
100s
Transmission Packet
Rate
10 m/s
Pause Time
1.0s
Routing Protocol
AODV/EAODV/EELAR
MAC Protocol
802.11
Channel Data Rate
11 Mbps
Mobility Speed
10 m/s to 50 m/s
TABLE II. SIMULATION CONFIGURATION FOR SCENARIO 2-VARYING
MOBILE NODES
Number of Nodes
20-100
Traffic Patterns
CBR (Constant Bit Rate)
Network Size (X * Y)
1000 x 1000
Simulation Time
25s
Transmission Packet
Rate
10 m/s
Pause Time
1.0s
Routing Protocol
AODV/EAODV/EELAR
MAC Protocol
802.11
Channel Data Rate
11 Mbps
Mobility Speed
30 m/s
B. Simulation Results
We have compared the performance of three routing
protocols using three performance metrics such as AODV,
EAODV and proposed EELAR technique for load balancing
QoS performance.
Scenario 1 Results:
Fig. 2. Average throughput analysis for different load balancing methods of
MANET
Fig. 3. Average delay analysis for different load balancing methods of
MANET
Fig. 4. Packet Delivery Ratio analysis for different load balancing methods of
MANET
(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Vol. 7, No. 5, 2016
253 | P a g e
www.ijacsa.thesai.org
Figures 2, 3, and 4 show the performance analysis for
average throughput, average end to end delay, and packet
delivery ratio, respectively for three studied routing protocols
such as AODV, EAODV, and EELAR. We vary the mobility
speed of mobile nodes by keeping total number of mobile
nodes 50 to each mobility speed. The results show that we have
achieved better QoS performance for proposed EELAR
protocol. For this first scenario. it is showing that performance
of throughput and PDR is improved by 35 % as compared to
EAODV protocol. The end to end delay is minimized by 15%
to 18% as compared to EAODV protocol. Similarly, Figures 5,
6, and 7 show the results for throughput, delay and PDR
respectively for network scenario 2. In the second scenario, the
throughput shows an improvement of 38% and delay is
minimized by 22% as compared to EAODV approach.
Scenario 2 Results
Fig. 5. Throughput analysis for different load balancing methods of MANET
varying number of mobile nodes
Fig. 6. Delay analysis for different load balancing methods of MANET
varying number of mobile nodes
Fig. 7. Packet delivery ratio analysis for different load balancing methods of
MANET varying number of mobile nodes
V. CONCLUSION
For MANET, load balancing technique plays a very vital
role in order to achieve the QoS solutions. The traditional
MANET routing protocols suffering from more routing
overhead and decreased packet delivery ratio due to not
addressing the load balancing in MANET communications. In
this paper, we first presented the problems in MANET, then
presented different solutions for load balancing techniques
presented so far. We designed new load balancing technique
for achieving the improved QoS performance as compared to
existing EAODV and AODV routing protocols. The results
section showing that we have simulated three protocols
AODV, EAODV and proposed EELAR with two different
network conditions. The results are compared by considering
three important performance metrics of any routing protocol
such as throughput, end to end delay and packet delivery ratio.
In all cases, proposed load balancing approach shows improved
performance when compared to existing methods.
REFERENCES
[1] S. Yin, X. Lin, MALB: MANET adaptive load balancing, in: IEEE
Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2004-Fall), vol. 4, September
2004, pp. 2843–2847.
[2] L. Zhang, Z. Zhao, Y. Shu, L. Wang, O.W., W. Yang, Load balancing of
multipath source routing in ad hoc networks, in: Proceeding of the IEEE
International Conference on Communications (ICC 2002), May 2002.
[3] K. Wu, J. Harms, Performance study of a multipath routing method for
wireless mobile ad hoc networks, in: Proceeding of the Ninth
International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of
Computer and Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS’01), August
2001.
[4] L. Wang, L.F. Zhang, Y.T. Shu, M. Dong, O.W.W. Yang, Multipath
source routing in wireless ad hoc networks, in: Proceeding of IEEE
CCECE, 2000, p. 479.
[5] A. Valera, W. Seah, S.V. Rao, Cooperative packet caching and shortest
multipath routing in mobile ad hoc networks, in: Proceeding of IEEE
INFOCOM, 2003.
[6] S. Roy, S. Bandyopadhyay, T. Ueda, K. Hasuike, Multipath routing in
ad hoc wireless networks with omni directional and directional antenna:
a comparative study, in: Proceeding of the Fourth International
Workshop on Distributed Computing, Mobile and Wireless Computing
(IWDC), 2002, pp. 184–191.
[7] A. Zhou, H. Hassanein, Load-balanced wireless ad hoc routing, in: IEEE
Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, vol. 2,
2001, pp. 1157–1161.
[8] Y.J. Lee, G.F. Riley, A workload-based adaptive load-balancing
technique for mobile ad hoc networks, in: IEEE Wireless
Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’2005), vol. 1,
2005, pp. 2002–2007.
[9] M. Perlman, Z. Haas, P. Scholander, S. Tabrizi, Alternate path routing
for load balancing in mobile ad hoc networks, in: IEEE Military
Communications Conference (MILCOM 2000), October 2000.
[10] P.Pham, S. Perreau, Multi-path routing protocol with load balancing
policy in mobile ad hoc networks, in: IFIP Int’l Conference on Mobile
and Wireless Communications Networks (MWCN 2002), September
2002.
[11] Y. Ganjali, A.Keshavarzian, Load balancing in ad hoc networks: single-
path routing vs. multi-path routing, in: Twenty-third Annual Joint
Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies
(INFOCOM 2004), March 2004.
[12] P. Pham and S. Perreau, “Performance analysis of reactive shortest path
and multi-path routing mechanism with load balance,” IEEE Conference
on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2003), March 2003.
[13] Turgut, D.; Turgut, B.; Das, S.K.; Elmasri, R.; , "Balancing loads in
mobile ad hoc networks," Telecommunications, 2003. ICT 2003, 10th
(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Vol. 7, No. 5, 2016
254 | P a g e
www.ijacsa.thesai.org
International Conference on , vol.1, no., pp. 490- 495 vol.1, 23 Feb.-1
March 2003.
[14] V. Saigal, A. Nayak, S. Pradhan, and R. Mall, "Load balanced routing in
mobile ad hoc networks", Computer Communications, Vol.27, 2004,
pp.295-305.
[15] Peter P.Pham, Sylvie Perreau , “Increasing the network performance
using multi-path routing mechanism with load balance, Ad Hoc
Networks, Volume 2, Issue 4, October 2004, Pages 433-459.
[16] Antonios Argyriou, Vijay Madisetti, “Using a new protocol to enhance
path reliability and realize load balancing in mobile ad hoc networks”,
Ad Hoc Networks, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 60-74.
[17] Gautam Chakrabarti, Sandeep Kulkarni, “Load balancing and resource
reservation in mobile ad hoc networks”, Ad Hoc Networks, Volume 4,
Issue 2, March 2006, Pages 186-203.
[18] [Oussama Souihli, Mounir Frikha, Mahmoud Ben Hamouda, "Load-
balancing in MANET shortest-path routing protocols", Ad Hoc
Networks, Volume 7, Issue 2, March 2009, Pages 431-442.
[19] Vinh Pham ,Erlend Larsen ,Paal E. Engelstad, Øivind Kure,
"Performance analysis of gateway load balancing in ad hoc networks
with random topologies ", Proceedings of the 7th ACM international
symposium on Mobility management and wireless access, 2009, pp.66-
74.
[20] Younghwan Yoo, Sanghyun Ahn, Dharma P. Agrawal, "Impact of a
simple load balancing approach and an incentive-based scheme on
MANET performance", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing,
Volume 70, Issue 2, February 2010, Pages 71-83.
[21] Yaser Khamayseh, Ghadeer Obiedat, Munner Bani Yassin, "Mobility
and Load aware Routing protocol for ad hoc networks", Journal of King
Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences, Volume 23,
Issue 2, July 2011, Pages 105-113.
[22] Hui Cheng, Shengxiang Yang, Jiannong Cao, "Dynamic Genetic
Algorithms for the Dynamic Load Balanced Clustering Problem in
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks", Expert Systems with Applications, , 5
September 2012.
