A Hop-by-Hop Congestion-Aware Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In Heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) congestion occurs with limited resources. Due to the shared wireless channel and dynamic topology, packet transmissions suffer from interference and fading. In heterogeneous ad hoc networks, throughput via a given route is depending on the minimum data rate of all its links. In a route of links with various data rates, if a high data rate node forwards more traffic to a low data rate node, there is a chance of congestion, which leads to long queuing delays in such routes. Since hop count is used as a routing metric in traditional routing, it do not adapt well to mobile nodes. A congestion-aware routing metric for MANETs should incorporate transmission capability, reliability, and congestion around a link. In this paper, we propose to develop a hop-by-hop congestion aware routing protocol which employs a combined weight value as a routing metric, based on the data rate, queuing delay, link quality and MAC overhead. Among the discovered routes, the route with minimum cost index is selected, which is based on the node weight of all the in-network nodes. Simulation results prove that our proposed routing protocol attains high throughput and packet delivery ratio, by reducing the packet drop and delay.