An Efficient Buffer Overflow Control Scheme to Mitigate Packet Loss in Manets

MANET (Mobile Ad hoc Network) is self-configuring, self-organizing, infrastructure-less network of mobile devices connected without wires. 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 to hold 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 source to destination and incurs packet loss, which causes the performance degradations 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 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, 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. And also a new node has to be waiting until it will get enough equal space from the QMN along with other neighbor nodes. During this waiting period, high packet loss can be occurred. 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 to congestion. In this paper, we proposed a scheme that integrates QMN technique with combinational buffer management (CBM) strategy, which includes both the features of messages and nodes, and transfer the duplicated messages to neighbour node 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