Adaptive MANET Routing for Low Overhead

Abstract

In wireless mission-critical systems, systems may be resource-constrained including limited bandwidth, so minimising protocol overhead, whilst maintaining performance, is important. Proactive MANET routing protocols tend to provide smaller route discovery latency than on-demand protocols because they maintain route information to all the nodes in the network at all time. However, such protocols may impose excessive soft-state routing control overhead which is generated by disseminating periodic update messages. In order to mitigate the side effects of the soft-state control over-heads, we propose two adaptive proactive routing algorithms, namely DT_MIAD and DT_ODPU. By tuning the value of refresh intervals dynamically and automatically, refresh updates are triggered based on traffic conditions and node mobility. We show through simulations that the proposed adaptive routing algorithms can outperform a traditional proactive routing protocol (OLSR).