Weighted Dynamic Bi-connected Group based Replica Allocation method for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Accessing remote services and data is one of the most important applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Data replication is one of the most popular techniques used to increase data availability by replicating frequently accessed data items locally or nearby. In MANETs, data replication helps to avoid data losses in case of unpredictable network partition and also aids in reducing the number of hops that a data is transmitted from source to destination. In this paper, an extension to DCG (Dynamic Connectivity based Grouping) [5] is proposed called W-DCG (Weighted Dynamic Connectivity based Grouping), which aims at addressing the limitations of DCG and most of the other proposed protocols in literature. The proposed protocol considers node properties such as memory capacity and remaining battery power while replicating data on nodes to achieve better load-balancing. Moreover it uses dynamic access frequencies to replicate data items which are currently in demand. Data sharing is done in large groups, which are stable to reduce duplicity of data. This type of collaborative replication increases the availability of different data items in a group. Extensive simulations are performed to analyze and compare the behaviour of W-DCG with DCG and No replica framework for different network scenarios generated by varying parameters such as network size and relocation period. The performance evaluation of W-DCG through simulation indicated that the proposed protocol increases the data accessibility and achieves better load-balancing in comparison to DCG and no-replication.