A New Routing Protocol Using Route Redundancy in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a new ad hoc routing protocol using route redundancy as one of route selection criteria. It is important to provide redundancy for the route from source to destination in mobile ad hoc networks that are susceptible to failure. Route redundancy implies the relative possibility that redundant paths will exist on a route to be built up. Our proposal aims to establish a route that contains more redundant paths toward a destination node by involving intermediate nodes with relatively more adjacent nodes in a possible route. Our approach can localize the effects of route failures, and reduce control traffic overhead and route reconfiguration time by enhancing the reachability to the destination node without source-initiated route rediscoveries at route failures. We show the route setup procedure considering link redundancy and the route reconfiguration procedures employing redundant path information at the intermediate nodes. Further, this paper presents a new route maintenance protocol. Most of existing ad hoc routing protocols re-initiate a route query procedure when a destination node moves away and a route failure occurs. However, our scheme makes the destination node find a neighbor node that knows the way to the source node and establish a partial route to the neighbor node. If the destination node can find any and connect to it, the route will be recovered. This produces less control overhead than a source-initiated route discovery. We show the performance of our routing schemes through simulations using the Network Simulator 2 (ns-2).