Abstract
Leader election and initialization are two fundamental problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The leader can serve as a coordinator in the MANETs and the initialization protocol can assign each host a sequential, unique, and short ID. As we know, no research on initialization for IEEE 802.11-based MANETs has been done. Here, we propose two contention-based leader election and initialization protocols for IEEE 802.11-based single-hop MANETs. We also provide an efficient approach to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocols, such that the performance can be evaluated in polynomial time. The evaluation results provide a guideline to set the size of the contention window and thus improve the performance of the proposed leader election and initialization protocols. The results can also be used as a guideline to set the size of the contention window for any contention-based protocol. Simulation results justify that the evaluation results provide a good guideline to set the size of the contention window. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.