An adaptive link caching scheme for on-demand routing in MANETs

With on-demand routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), for example, dynamic source routing (DSR), a source node tries to find a route to the destination node only when it has a packet addressed to that destination node. And the source node can find a route either from its own route cache or by initializing a route discovery. To reduce the traffic generated by such route discoveries, caching of routing information is necessary. And in the design of caching schemes, cache timeout (i.e., the time period that a link would stay in the cache) is a critical parameter. However, only a few works have been done on how to set it. In this paper, we propose a new link caching scheme with adaptive timeouts. In this scheme, the cache timeout of a link is decided based on the estimation of the link's lifetime. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can adapt to scenario changes and hence improve the performance of on-demand routing for MANETs.