Proposal of a Scheme Integrating QMN Technique with Buffer Overflow Control Strategy to Mitigate Packet Loss in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

MANET (Mobile Ad hoc Network) is a self-configuring, self-organizing, and infrastructure-less network of mobile devices connected without wires. Communication between the end nodes in MANETs can be done through intermediate nodes. Because of the dynamic changes in the network topology, there is no centralized control in ad hoc networks. So, mobile nodes can communicate with each other via intermediate nodes. The buffer size of intermediate nodes plays a significant role in holding packets in the buffer before dropping the newly arrived packets. In MANET, buffer overflow (congestion) occurs in any intermediary nodes when data packets pass through the source to the destination and incur packet loss, which causes the performance degradation of a network. Congestion can be reduced by using several Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques. Queue Management Node or “QMN” is an active queue management strategy to control packet drops by assigning the space of a buffer node to all its neighbouring nodes dynamically depending upon the total number of packets received from its neighbours. In this scheme, the authors did not take into account the impact of collaboration between neighbors of a central node. They only consider the characteristics of nodes while ignoring the message properties in MANET. Additionally, a new node has to wait until it gets enough equal space from the QMN along with other neighbor nodes. Whenever the algorithm is triggered by the occurrence of a selected incident, the allotment of buffer area at a node is dynamically adjusted. During this waiting period, high packet loss can occur. So, an efficient buffer overflow control scheme is required to make sure every node has adequate storage space to hold the data once the buffer of the node is near congestion.

In this work, we proposed a scheme that integrates the QMN technique with the combinational buffer management (CBM) strategy, which includes both the features of messages and nodes and transfers the duplicated messages to neighbour nodes for total utility optimization, rather than deleting them. By using this scheme, packet loss can be mitigated in MANETs efficiently. Our simulation results here reveal that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than other existing schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput, overhead ratio, and end-to-end delay.