Feasible Progressive Source Routing-Based Strategy for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Source routing protocols developed for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are challenged by the mobility attribute of moving nodes. The consequences of link failures trigger a lot of route discoveries that generates numerous number of route request (RREQ) packets. This can cause high overhead due the big amount of control packets propagated throughout the network where the resources, such as battery and bandwidth, are consumed inefficiently. As a result, the network lifetime and performance are degraded seriously. The route discovery procedure in most of these protocols does not consider the limitation of network resources. Common source routing protocols, such as DSR and RDSR, blindly flood the network with RREQs whenever a route to a destination is needed. Blind flooding causes redundancy, contention and collision in the network which increases the overhead in MANETs. This paper presents a feasible progressives route discovery strategy for source routing to reduce the overhead by reducing the amount of flooding of RREQs in the network. The performance of the proposed strategy was evaluated and compared to DSR and RDSR in terms of the amount of RREQ and control packets generated. The results showed that the proposed strategy improves the performance and extend the lifetime of the network as it presents lower number of RREQs and overhead compared to DSR and RDSR.