A forwarding cache vlan protocol (FCVP) in wireless networks

The Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) technology is one of the hottest areas of networking systems. A VLAN is a logical connection rather than physical that allows network devices to be combined as "virtual LANs". The VLAN technology functions by logically segmenting the network into different broadcast domains so that packets can only delivered between ports with the same VLAN identity (group member). By using this characteristic of VLAN there is a very flexible mechanism to group the physical ports together. Wireless networks also need the flexibility to collect more than two devices equipped with wireless communication and networking capability. In recent years, wireless network has been attracting a lot of attention due to wireless devices have enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity. In order to communicate among some groups of wireless devices without the convention concept of clusters we propose a novel model to form the multiple-domain or the multiple-group as "Virtual LANs" according to the logical connection in ad hoc networks. In this paper we also propose a novel forwarding cache VLAN protocol (FCVP) for ad hoc networks to simulate the behavior of VLAN in ad hoc network. For our purpose, each node in ad hoc networks records the nodes of the same VLAN identity in a cache table to keep the information of the VLAN identification for forwarding the packets. We simulate the proposed protocol in ad hoc network environment between 50 and 80 nodes with different size of VLANs groups. The result shows that the throughput of our protocol delivering packets to all nodes in the same VLAN group is more than 84% of the case. Furthermore, we compared to the flooding, the efficiency of communication improves up to 68% on our FCVP.