Mobility aware path maintenance in ad hoc networks.

Current research on routing in ad hoc networks consider route discovery as the main problem and literature describes numerous on-demand protocols that discover a path between a source-destination pair. In contrast, the route maintenance phase is relatively neglected, and most protocols resort to route discovery as a result of route failure. We argue that this approach is inefficient, due to the fact that these protocols treat route failures in the same way as route discovery, and hence, the quality of service suffers from the additional delays resulting from the route rediscovery overhead. For data sessions over long periods of time, there is a good chance that the initial route discovered will fail before the session ends. Thus, an intelligent protocol should be more proactive in maintaining routes so that packets may be readily switched to an alternate route when the route failure occurs, rather than wait for the route to break to restart the route discovery process. In this paper, we describe an efficient protocol that carries out route maintenance using path reliability information, and analyze the effect of using reliability information in path selection. Simulations results show that our approach outperforms AODV in terms of increased throughput and reduced overhead. Our approach can be an useful enhancement to on-demand routing protocols to increase their overall efficiency.