Validation of Clustering Algorithm for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks Using Colored Petri Nets

Abstract

Validation of protocols is essential to ensure that the protocol is unambiguous, complete and functionally correct. One approach to ensure the correctness of an existing protocol is to create a formal model for the protocol, and analyze the model to determine if indeed the protocol provides the defined services correctly. Due to the dynamic nature, concurrency and different levels of abstraction associated with the Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) protocols, it is difficult to design a model for MANET protocols with existing techniques like UML and other modeling languages. Colored Petri Nets (CPN) is a suitable modeling language for this purpose. This is a promising tool for describing and studying information processing systems that are characterized as being concurrent, asynchronous, distributed, parallel, nondeterministic and stochastic. As a graphical tool, CPNs can be used as a visual-communication aid similar to flow charts, block diagrams and networks. In addition, tokens are used in these nets to simulate the dynamic and concurrent activities of the system. This paper considers a weighted clustering algorithm (WCA) for MANETs which takes into consideration the ideal degree, transmission power, mobility and battery power of a mobile node. In MANET a node can move in and out and thus the MANETs topology (graph) dynamically changes. This paper considers a Topology Approximation (TA) mechanism to address this problem of mobility and perform simulations of typical protocol called On-Demand WCA. Our simulation reports validate the correctness of both TA mechanism in terms of dynamically changing topology of MANETs and WCA in terms of number of cluster heads and dominant set updates.