A Stable Backbone-Based on Demand Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), high node mobility leads to frequent link breaks and creates complexities in route discovery, this effect on the quality of service (QoS) and degrades the systems performance. So, providing a high quality communication using stable links among mobile nodes is a challenging issue in MANETs. Existing stability based routing algorithms initiate estimation of route stability metrics during the routing process, results in increased delay and overhead. In order to overcome these issues, in this paper, we construct a stable backbone-based multipath routing protocol (SBMRP). Initially, the nodes with high residual bandwidth, residual power, link quality and low mobility are designated as candidate nodes. Then multiple paths are established between source and destination through these candidate nodes, thus forming a routing backbone. If any candidate node in the path tend to fail due to lack of bandwidth, energy or link quality, alternate path through other candidate node is established before path breaks. Proposed routing scheme has been compared with other three existing protocols: AODV, AOMDV and RSQR. The protocol performance has been evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load, delay and packet drop ratio.