A Predictive Route Maintenance Protocol Based on Signal Strength for Dense Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

 Abstract—Ad hoc wireless networks consist of mobile network without base stations, and are characterized by a host in a highly dynamic network topology. The topology changes frequently due to host migration, signal interference and power outages, making the route maintenance a challenging consideration in designing routing protocols. Most of the existing protocols perform an end-to-end route discovery to establish a new connection for the communication during link breaks. Such route repair mechanism causes high control overhead and long packet delay in a dense network. In this paper, we propose an enhanced proactive route maintenance protocol, where a node that is likely to cause link error, as a preventive measure, hands off routing information to a new node by monitoring the signal strength of the received signals. The proposed protocol aims to reduce the probability of route breakage and hence reduces the control overhead and latency, and increases the packet delivery ratio. Through simulation, we show that the proposed protocol is simple, robust and effective. Index Terms—Dense MANETs, RSSI, link stability, apriori maintenance. An ad hoc network is formed by a group of wireless devices without depending on any infrastructure. Each node communicates directly with its neighbors and functions as a router that forwards packets for nodes that are not within transmission range of the sender. Maintaining communication in ad hoc networks requires effective routing mechanisms in the presence of dynamic topology, which may cause route failures and requires discovery of new routes. Therefore, the routing protocol which aims at minimizing the control overhead should minimize the overhead from such maintenance. Routing protocols for ad hoc networks can be categorized as proactive or reactive (on-demand) based on when routes are discovered. Proactive protocols maintain up-to-date routing information regardless of the presence of traffic, and so consume valuable resources such as bandwidth and power even if the network is idle. On-demand routing protocols have been shown to reduce routing overhead by only maintaining actively used routes. Although on-demand routing protocols only initiate route discovery when a route is needed, such discovery is typically performed via network-wide flooding. Since flooding consumes a substantial amount of bandwidth, it is essential to reduce the frequency of route discoveries, and so network wide flooding. To overcome performance problems due to frequent route discovery attempts, hybrid protocols