Reduction of overhead in routing protocols for MANET using fuzzy set-based decision making

Abstract

It is well-known that dynamic topology, mobility of nodes, infrastructure less property and absence of central coordinator; make the behaviour of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) uncertain. Routing is the major step in the operation of MANET and the establishment of route from source to destination thus becomes crucial. Routing decision is distributed among the nodes in the network and the reliable and effective routing predominantly depends on proper establishment of route from source to destination. Route establishment depends largely on control packets and those packets induce more overhead in the network, which in turn degrades the performance of the network. The present work proposes a novel method to reduce the control overhead by predicting the quality of the neighbouring nodes that sustain more, using a fuzzy set decision approach. The flooding of control packets is based on a fuzzy decision taken on success rate of each link in the previous trials and residual energy of the neighbouring nodes. Simulation study reveals that this approach significantly reduces the control overhead in the network and improves the overall performance.