On minimizing the impact of mobility on topology control in mobile ad hoc networks

Although topology control has received much attention in stationary sensor networks by effectively minimizing energy consumption, reducing interference, and shortening end-to-end delay, the transience of mobile nodes in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) renders topology control a great challenge. To circumvent the transitory nature of mobile nodes, k-edge connected topology control algorithms have been proposed to construct robust topologies for mobile networks. However, uniformly using the value of k for localized topology control algorithms in any local graph is not effective because nodes move at different speeds. Moreover, the existing k-edge connected topology control algorithms need to determine the value of k a priori, but moving speeds of nodes are unpredictable, and therefore, these algorithms are not practical in MANETs. A dynamic method is proposed in this paper to effectively employ k-edge connected topology control algorithms in MANETs. The proposed method automatically determines the appropriate value of k for each local graph based on local information while ensuring the required connectivity ratio of the whole network. The results show that the dynamic method can enhance the practicality and scalability of existing k-edge connected topology control algorithms while guaranteeing the network connectivity.