Effect of limiting the hop count: Distributed Three-Hop Routing Protocol

Abstract

Hybrid Wireless Networks have gained a lot of importance because of its ultra-high performance in today’s
networking world. Hybrid Wireless Networks consists of both Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) and Infrastructure
Wireless Networks. MANETs are infrastructreless and most probably short lived networks where mobile nodes
communicate directly through peer-to-peer. Infrastructure Wireless Network requires a central point of access. As there
are advantages of using these two together there are also disadvantages that leads to high overload, increase in number
of hotspots, low reliability. Thus, we need routing protocols to increase the network scalability and capacity. However,
these flaws will be overcome using Distributed Three-Hop Routing Protocol leading to low overhead, reduced number of
hotspots and increase in reliability. A distributed Three-Hop Routing protocol (DTR) divides a message stream into
number of segments and then transmit these segments in a distributed manner. It makes full use of widespread base
stations using its high speed ad-hoc interface and reduces congestion using its cellular interface. DTR reduces the
overhead by eliminating the work for route discovery and maintenance. Finally we can improve the lifetime of the
network by analyzing the impact of limiting the hop count. This is done by calculating the energy efficiency of every
node.