Policy-Based Adaptive Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

This paper investigates policy-based adaptive routing for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET's), in which routing metric, routing algorithm parameters and/or protocol selection can be controlled in response to observed performance and external service needs. We propose an adaptive routing framework which allows introduction of adjustable parameters and programmable routing modules. Control information is disseminated through the network to exchange state variables, and a global distributed policy manager is responsible for the adaptive operations at nodes of the network. The proposed architecture can support two types of adaptive mechanisms: the first involves switched selection between a set of routing protocols options or metrics, while the second is based on an integrated routing algorithm which incorporates adaptation of key network state parameters such as link speed or congestion. Example algorithms and simulation results are given, which show that adaptive routing help achieve the desired system performance under the dynamically changing network conditions.