IMPROVED NETWORK CONNECTIVITY IN MANETS

The growth in wireless communication technologies has resulted in a considerable amount of attention given to mobile adhoc networks. All mobile hosts in an adhoc network are embedded with packet forwarding capabilities. It is decentralized and is independent of infrastructure. Since mobile hosts in an adhoc network usually move freely, the topology of the network changes dynamically and disconnection occurs frequently. These characteristics require the routing protocols to find an alternative path towards the destination for data transfer. The existing on-demand routing protocols does the alternative path establishment only after the disconnection of links in the existing path. The data sent by the source during alternate path establishment period will be lost leading to incomplete data transfer. The network traffic will therefore increase considerably. This problem can be overcome by establishing an alternative path when the existing path is more likely to be broken, by sending a warning message to the source indicating the likelihood of disconnection. In this paper an attempt has been made to analyze a protocol that improves the network connectivity by preempting the alternative path before the existing link gets failed by monitoring the signal strength and 'age of the path'.