A Critical Analysis of Congestion Adaptive Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Congestion in mobile ad hoc networks leads to transmission delays and packet losses and causes wastage of time and energy on recovery. In the current designs, routing is not congestion adaptive. Routing may let a congestion happen which is detected by congestion control, but dealing with congestion in this reactive manner results in longer delay and unnecessary packet loss and requires significant overhead if a new route is needed. This problem becomes more visible especially in large-scale transmission of heavy traffic such as multimedia data, where congestion is more probable and the negative impact of packet loss on the service quality is of more significance. Routing should not only be aware of, but also be adaptive to, network congestion. Routing protocols which are adaptive to the congestion status of a mobile ad hoc network can greatly improve the network performance. Many protocols which are congestion aware and congestion adaptive have been proposed. In this paper, we present a survey of congestion adaptive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks.