Method for managing potentially disruptive nodes in a mobile ad-hoc network

• US 9,125,077 B2
• Filed: 12/21/2011
• Issued: 09/01/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 12/23/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Elektrobit Wireless Communications OY (Bittium Oyj), Indra Peru SA, Selex Communications Limited (Leonardo S.p.A.), SAAB Cars, Thales SA, Radmor SA (WB Electronics S.A.)
• Original Assignee: Elektrobit Wireless Communications OY (Bittium Oyj), Indra Sistemas, Selex ES S.p.A. (Leonardo S.p.A.), Saab AB, Thales SA, Radmor SA (WB Electronics S.A.)
• Inventors: Joly, Antoine, Massin, Raphael, Fachau, Laurent
• Primary Examiner(s): Lee, John J
• Application Number:
  US13/997,078
• Publication Number:
  US 20140094205A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,350 Days
• Field of Search: 455/501, 455/453, 455/452.2, 455/41.1, 455/41.2, 455/500, 455/515, 455/525, 455/67.11, 370/329, 370/338
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 24/02 Arrangements for optimising operational condition
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 40/22 using selective relaying for reaching a BTS [Base Transceiver Station] or an access point
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 40/246 Connectivity information discovery
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 40/32 for defining a routing cluster membership
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 84/18 Self-organising networks, e.g. ad-hoc networks or sensor networks

Abstract

A method for managing node communications in a mobile ad-hoc network is provided where at least a node in the said network performs the following steps: identifying if it is a Potentially Disruptive Node (PDN) or a non-PDN node, a PDN node being a node that has a number of connected 1-hop neighbor nodes greater than a predetermined value K; when the node is identified as a PDN node, selecting a subset of its 1-hop neighbor nodes, the selected nodes being the only 1-hop neighbor nodes that are allowed to communicate directly with the PDN node, the selected nodes being called Bridge Nodes (BN), non-BN nodes being called Regular Nodes (RN), the said RN nodes being able to communicate with PDN nodes via the selected BN nodes.

Claims

1. A method for managing node communications in a mobile ad-hoc network, wherein at least a node in the said network performs the following steps:

identifying if it is a Potentially Disruptive Node (PDN) or a non-PDN node, the PDN node being a node that has a number of connected 1-hop neighbouring nodes greater than a predetermined value K, K being an integer of value 1 or greater;

when the node is identified as the PDN node, selecting a subset of the 1-hop neighbour nodes, the selected nodes being only the 1-hop neighbour nodes that are allowed to communicate directly with the PDN node, the selected nodes being called Bridge Nodes (BN), non-BN nodes being called Regular Nodes (RN), the RN nodes being able to communicate with PDN nodes via the selected BN nodes.

2. A method according to claim 1, wherein a node is identified as a PDN node if its number of 1-hop neighbours is α

times greater than the mean number of 1-hop neighbours of its 1-hop neighbours, α

being a predetermined real value with α

>

1.

3. A method according to claim 1, wherein the predetermined integer value K is chosen as K≧

3.

4. A method according to claim 1, wherein the PDN node identification and the BN nodes selection are performed periodically.

5. A method according to claim 1, wherein the PDN node identification and the BN nodes selection are performed each time the number of 1-hop and/or 2-hop neighbours of a node is changing.

6. A method according to claim 1 wherein a PDN node comes back to a non-PDN status if at least one of the two following conditions is not fulfilled:

7. A method according to claim 1, wherein BN nodes are uniformly distributed in the mobile ad-hoc network.

8. A method according to claim 1, wherein BN nodes are selected so that a BN node has no BN node in its connected β

-hop neighbourhood, β

being a configurable parameter.

9. A method according to claim 8 wherein BN nodes are selected so that a Regular Node RN has at least one BN node in its connected β

-hop neighbourhood.

10. A node belonging to a mobile ad-hoc network, comprising means to implement the method according to claim 1.

11. A node according to claim 10, comprising a PDN Topology Control module, the said module making links between a PDN node and its RN nodes not allocable for data exchange, in order to decrease the high number of links allocable for data exchange between a PDN and its connected 1-hop neighbours.

12. A mobile ad-hoc network, comprising a plurality of nodes according to claim 10.