Dynamic Cloudlet-Assisted Energy-Saving Routing Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), if mobile devices frequently leave or join the overlay of MANETs, the communication links between mobile devices or between mobile devices and cloud will lose or reestablish; for searching and routing the needed cloud services again, more energy will be consumed. 5G is the fifth generation mobile communication technology, and fog computing is defined as a distributed computing infrastructure that is able to handle billions of Internet-connected devices. Therefore, combining fog computing with 5G, we present a novel and effective dynamic cloudlet-assisted routing mechanism (DCRM) for MANETs to solve the energy-saving problem of link breakages. First, for every mobile device in MANETs, we build a temporary file to record its identity and route information in a certain time. Moreover, as a key promising technology of 5G, device-to-device is used as the communication way between mobile devices, because it can enhance the communication ability and the information sharing ability between mobile devices. Second, cloudlets can be considered as small data centers, and we set the sharing relation table and the cooperation mechanism between cloudlets. Then, relying on these, mobile devices can quickly route and search the requested services regardless of the frequent movement of mobile devices in MANETs. The experimental results show that DCRM can save more time and several times more energy, and display more advantages than the network model without the proposed mechanism in many ways, consequently enable cloud to provide services that are more realistic for the future mobile network applications.