Intelligent routing and flow control in MANETs

Improving the performance of Mobile Ad hoc NET-works (MANETs) is challenging. The MANETs communications are presented with many constraints such as dynamic topology, unreliability of wireless links, and limited bandwidth and energy resources. The routing in MANETs can be particularly difficult due to aggravated congestion problem. This paper proposes a new QoS (Quality of Service) routing protocol combined with the flow control mechanism. This routing protocol selects the routes having more resources in an intelligent manner and does not rely on diffusion. The proposed routing protocol uses a new metric to find the route with higher transmission rate, less latency and better stability. In order to reinforce the congestion avoidance, a flow controlmechanismis employed to adapt the transmission rate for each route. The proposed routing solution is modeled by ant systems. The numerical results are obtained using the Network Simulator (NS2.31). These results confirm that the joint consideration of flow control and routing can significantly improve the network performance compared to other QoS routing protocols such as the QoS-AODV (Ad hoc On Demand Vector with QoS) protocol.