With the rapid advances in wireless technologies and portable devices, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have become a popular area of research and development in the last decade. Moreover, MANET is a core technology for the future ubiquitous networks. However, in order to realize this MANET technology, many problems still need to be solved or at least improved in terms of network efficiency and performance.
This thesis proposes two novel schemes to improve such network efficiency in mobile ad hoc networks. First, the unidirectional-link aware MAC protocol (UAMAC) is proposed to reduce the frequency of packet collisions that may occur in the heterogeneous network environment and therefore cause to decrease increases network throughput. Secondly, a new group communication protocol, named geometry-driven geocasting protocol (GGP), is presented to reduce the redundancy of transmitting the same messages towards multiple targets by building an efficient shared path. All of the performance evaluations for each scheme show that proposed schemes can reduce the network overhead and improve the performance over conventional schemes.
