IRR: A Novel Incremental Recoverable Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In traditional routing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), it costs highly to rebuild routes by flooding query messages again and again over the whole network. A novel routing protocol for MANETs, Incremental Recoverable Routing (IRR) Protocol, is proposed in this paper. Unlike the previous protocols, nodes in IRR perform routing discovery and maintenance based on the use of the process of incremental recovery among a limited number of nodes, named infected nodes. Those nodes are dynamically infected during the period of content delivery without any additional information exchanging employed. By performing such recovery process, the routes will be recovered, improved incrementally and eventually form the shortest paths between the sources and the destinations. Once the routing path become unavailable aroused from sudden link breakage, the source node first uses the process of incremental recovery to rebuild a route for the destination. In case none of the available paths can be built among all the infected nodes, a query message will be flooded over the whole network. By investigating among extensive simulation results, it suggests that the process of incremental recovery is usually sufficient for routing maintenance in most cases and the IRR protocol performs well regardless of nodes mobility.