Trivial solution for a non-trivial problem in MANETs

The wireless communication has earned much popularity, in the recent past. The discipline has been able to grab the focus of academia and the attention of industry. Specifically, the variants of wireless communication, like MANET, BAN, PAN, VANET, etc, are scoring more as they are highly adaptive in nature and light in installation. However, the coordination among the nodes, of such networks, stands still as a challenge. In the context of MANET, a wide range of coordination protocols exist for fault free as well as faulty scenario. Some of them provide very limited failure resiliency by electing vice-leader whereas others exhibit slightly better failure tolerance by having more than one passive (stand by) leaders. Unfortunately, in the worst case, when both, leader and possible alternatives crash, these protocols initiate a completely new instance of the protocol. In this paper, we propose a best node based election protocol. Also, we provide a simple and proactive approach to make the protocol fault tolerant. Moreover, the fault tolerant approach provided in the article can be implemented in most of the leader election protocols, specifically, used in wireless communication. However, we have considered mobile ad hoc environment to show case the strength of our proactive approach. The proposal has been substantiated by efficiency analysis and exhaustive simulation.