Providing Stable Routes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, routes are mostly multi-hop and nodes communicate via packet radios. With increasing number of mobile devices, the network is subjected to frequent topology changes. In such networks, a major challenge is to provide seamless connectivity without incurring excessive routing overhead. Routing protocols for ad hoc networks generally select the best possible path based on the current topology. However, these protocols cannot handle mobility induced route failures. A few ad hoc routing protocols have been proposed which select multiple, disjoint path to the destination. These multipath protocols start forwarding packet on the first available route and in case the route fails, it switches over to the next available path. In this way, they save on the route rediscovery overhead, but there is still a substantial overhead in switching among the alternate paths. In this paper, we propose to use link availability estimation technique to select the most stable route from among the alternate paths. The proposed route selection technique was tested by extending AOMDV, a well-known ad hoc, on-demand, multipath routing protocol. Empirical results indicate that selecting stable route results in higher throughput in dynamic network topology scenarios.