Topological Analysis of Mobile ad hoc networks in large

scale scenarios

V.R.Sarma Dhulipala1 Sivaranjani.R.N2 Jaisree.S3

1. Lecturer, Anna University, India

2. student , Anna University, India
3. student, Anna University , India
E-mail: sivaranjani.itbit@gmail.com

Abstract

As wireless networks grow in size, their complexity also increases . The grown complexity can be studied and analysed
based on few network parameters like throughput and delay in various ways and one of them is the study of the
scalability of topologies .This paper presents a study on the analysis of Star and Ring topologies in mobile ad hoc
networks . we simulated for 5 interactive runs for the comparison and analysis. The two above topologies were
graphically depicted and explained. we also explained the causes for observed delay and throughput.

Keywords: MANET,star topology,ring topology, fault, throughput and delay

1.0 INTRODUCTION The single most important feature that differentiates

Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) is a kind of wireless ad-
hoc network, and is a self-configuring network of mobile
routers (and associated hosts) connected by wireless links –
the union of which form an arbitrary topology. Each node
of an ad hoc network can both route and forward data.The
exploding need for computing and communication on the
move has led to reliance on ad hoc network .The routers are
free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily;
thus, the network's wireless topology may change rapidly
and unpredictably[9,10]. Such a network may operate in a
standalone fashion, or may be connected to the larger
Internet.
Fig.1Mobile Ad hoc network
MANET is the absence of a fixed infrastructure. No part of
the network is dedicated to support individually any
specific network functionality, with routing (topology
discovery, data forwarding) being the most prominent
example. Additional examples of functions that cannot rely
on a central service, and which are also of high relevance to
this work, are naming services, certification authorities
(CA), directory and other administrative services. Even if
such services were assumed, their availability would not be
guaranteed, either due to the dynamically changing
topology that could easily result in a partitioned network, or
due to congested links close to the node acting as a server.
Furthermore, performance issues such as delay constraints
on acquiring responses from the assumed infrastructure
would pose an additional challenge. Additionally , in
MANET freely roaming nodes form transient associations
with their neighbors, join and leave MANET sub-domains
independently and without notice. Thus it may be difficult
in most cases to have a clear picture of the ad hoc network
membership[1] Consequently, especially in the case of a
large-size network, no form of established trust
relationships among the majority of nodes could be
assumed. In such an environment, there is no guarantee that
a path between two nodes would be free of malicious

1
 Topological Analysis of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks in Large Scale Scenarios
nodes, which would not comply with the employed protocol
and attempt to harm the network operation.
The definition of scalability is that the routing protocol
must provide with additional throughput and low delay[8].
In this paper we analyse the scalability of star and ring
topology in mobile ad hoc network .we detail our general
methodology for ascertaining the scalability of topologies
and then provide simulation results and analysis for ad hoc
network under study
2.0 Design of our Experiment and parameters:
Efficient,ScalableNetwork Simulation:Past simulation tools
lack the ability to simulate large scale networks in an
accurate manner. This is due to the fact that past simulation
tools require an immense amount of memory and runtime
that make such studies impractical. QualNet , on the other
hand ,is a scalable network simulation library that was
designed with the primary goal of simulating large high
fidelity models of wired, wireless, and mixed networks in
an efficient manner [5, 6].
The simulations were performed with
five different area sizes and numbers of nodes ,5 nodes,10
nodes,50 nodes,100 nodes. In order to speed up the
simulations, we only used one source and a single
destination node. The nodes were randomly distributed.
2.1Simulation Environment:
The simulations were performed using the QualNet
Simulator v4.0 from Scalable Network Technologies,
which is a commercial GloMoSim based product [5,6]. A
Sun SPARC UltraAX-MP (3 x 433 MHz, 2GB memory)
built our hardware environment. While it exists a multi-
threaded version of QualNet for parallel execution on
multiple processors, the university version only supports a
single processor. The simulator is fully implemented in
C++ while the graphical toolkit is implemented in Java.
QualNet Developer is a collection of five different tools:
• QualNet Simulator: The simulator itself, fast and
scalable.
• QualNet Animator: A graphical user interface for
intuitive experiment setup and animation tool.
• QualNet Designer: A finite state machine tool for
custom protocol development.
• QualNet Analyzer: A statistical graphing tool for
evaluating the metrics.
• QualNet Tracer: A packet-level visualization tool
for viewing the packets going up and down the
protocol stack
Simulation speed and scalability:
Although Scalable Networks describes
QualNet Simulator as very fast and scalable and supporting
10’s of thousands of nodes, we were not able to run all
simulations initially planned for this project. At first we
intended to employ 1000 nodes, as this number was often
chosen in other papers. Unfortunately, we realized that the
simulation is not feasible at this number of nodes, because
it would require huge system resources and take weeks to
complete[2]. As the university edition of QualNet only
supports sequential execution on one processor, our
simulator could not make use of the three processors built
into our system. So we decided to redimension the project
to 100 nodes.
2.2 Star Topology
Star networks are one of the most common computer
network topologies. In its simplest form, a star network
consists of one central switch, hub or computer which acts
as a conduit to transmit messages. The star topology
reduces the chance of network failure by connecting all of
the systems to a central node. When applied to a bus-based
network, this central hub rebroadcasts all transmissions
received from any peripheral node to all peripheral nodes
on the network, sometimes including the originating node.
All peripheral nodes may thus communicate with all others
by transmitting to, and receiving from, the central node
only. The failure of a transmission line linking any
peripheral node to the central node will result in the
isolation of that peripheral node from all others, but the rest
of the systems will be unaffected.
Advantages
• Good performance.
• Scalable, Easy to set up and to expand.
• Any non-centralised failure will have very little
effect on the network, whereas on a ring network it
would all fail with one fault.
• Easy to detect faults
• Data Packets are sent quickly as they do not have
to travel through any unnecessary nodes.
• It is used for centralised control.
Each device is isolated on its own cable. This makes it easy
to isolate individual devices from the network by
disconnecting them from the wiring hub.All data goes
through the central point, which can be equipped with
diagnostic devices that make it easy to trouble shoot and
manage the network. Hierarchical organization allows
isolation of traffic on the channel. This is beneficial when
several, but not all, computers place a heavy load on the
network. Traffic from those heavily used computers can be
separated from the rest or dispersed throughout for a more
even flow of traffic. First of all Star Topology is less
expensive because each one of the device needs only one
link and one I/O port , it takes a very little time to install
and also quite easy to configure it. Star topology is also
strong like Mesh topology, if any node fails to connect it
will not affect the network, easy fault identification and
error isolation ,easy to modify
Table 1: Parameters - Star Topology
Through 4.4*105 4.3*105 4.0*105 4.6*105
Put
Delay 0.035 0.038 0.037 0.035
Fig. 2: Star topology
2.3 Ring Topology
A ring topology is a network topology or circuit
arrangement in which each network device is attached
along the same signal path to two other devices, forming a
path in the shape of a ring. Each device in the network that
is also referred to as node handles every message that flows
through the ring. Each node in the ring has a unique
address. Since in a ring topology there is only one pathway
between any two nodes, ring networks are generally
disrupted by the failure of a single link.
The redundant topologies are used to eliminate network
downtime caused by a single point of failure. All networks
need redundancy for enhanced reliability. Network
reliability is achieved through reliable equipment and
network designs that are tolerant to failures and faults. The
FDDI networks overcome the disruption in the network by
sending data on a clockwise and a counterclockwise ring. In
case there is a break in data flow,the data is wrapped back
onto the complementary ring before it reaches the end of
the cable thereby maintaining a path to every node within
the complementary ring.
3
Advantages of Ring Topology – Design and
Implementation is easy in Ring topology. Link failures can
be easily identified Devices are connected with their related
nodes only.
Fig. 3: Ring Topology
Table 2: Parameters - Ring Topology
Through 4.4*105 4.3*105 4.0*105 4.6*105
Put
Delay 0.035 0.038 0.037 0.035
2.4 Scalability
Due to the continuing proliferation of ever more powerful
devices, it becomes increasingly interesting to build large-
scale and complex distributed network applications that one
is accustomed to from the Internet such as name services,
messaging systems or storage systems for mobile ad hoc
networks as well. As peer-to-peer networks share key
characteristics with MANETs such as resilience to dynamic
network topologies, the lack of any central infrastructure, or
the need for self-organization, the convergence of mobile
ad hoc networks and peer-to-peer overlay networks appears
to be a very promising way to build such distributed
applications in mobile environments. Unstructured,
broadcast-based peer-to-peer networks generally suffer
from severe scalability problems with increasing numbers
of participating nodes, which especially limits their general
applicability in MANETs with their scarce resources[3].
Scalability is a very important factor for mobile ad-hoc
network protocols, as it determines if a protocol will
function or fail when the number of mobile users increases.
However, there are still very few papers published in this
subject area. We assume this might be due to the huge
amount of system resources and processing power such a
large scale simulation requires. We used Qual-Net
 Topological Analysis of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks in Large Scale Scenarios

simulator, which is commercial and is faster than ns-2 for 0.06

instance.
0.05

0.04

delay(s)
star
0.03
ring
2.5 Throughput 0.02

Throughput is the rate at which a computer 0.01

or network sends or receives data. It therefore is a good 0

0 20 40 60 80 100 120
measure of the channel capacity of a communications
nodes
link[7]. Our present study focuses on the general properties
of the node throughput available for a fixed ad hoc wire- Fig 5: Nodes Vs delay(S)
less networks. The nodes in our model do not move, which
modifies the customary definition of an ad hoc network to a
backbone-less network of wireless nodes occupying a flat
topology. Throughput, Delay and Reliability are inter- 3.0 RESULT
related, i.e. a network will typically be able to achieve
better performance by reducing its delay or increasing its As a result of our studies, it is understood that ring structure
throughput. performs poor in larger networks, as it shows high delays
and delivers less than 30% of all packets in a network of
200 nodes. The performance of star structure was very
5
good in all network sizes.The results we obtained in this
4.5 simulation experiment were comparable and even better
4 compared to the simulation experiments conducted by other
3.5
simulation tools like NS-2, GloMoSim and other network
throughput

3
star
2.5
ring
tools by us. The results are almost found replicas of the
2
1.5
results quoted in references [2]. In this simulation, we also
1 found that star structure has higher throughput than ring
0.5 structure. The results shows that the better performance
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
can be had with the clustering of the systems and better
nodes processing capability equipment.

Fig 4: Nodes Vs throughput

2.5 Delay 4.0 CONCLUSION

Network delays and delay variations are two of the most
important network performance metrics directly impacting
real-time applications. [4]
• End-to-end delay: End-to-end delay indicates how long it
took for a packet to travel from the CBR source to the
application layer of the destination. It represents the
average data delay an application or a user experiences
when transmitting data.
As for as we have analysed star topology has a fairly
constant delay whereas in ring topology the delay rises
abruptly and falls gradually with increase in number of
nodes.
Our study of this simulation experiment gave us an idea
about usage of a particular topology for various application
environments and we think the results may better help the
other researchers working in this area. We also found the
results of our experiment may be added to literature for
better understanding of the particular scenario.
5.0 FUTURE WORK
In future we are planning to set up a systematic framework
for the study of various performance and quality of service
issues in networking standards with better ease.
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