On-Demand Routing Protocol with Tabu Search Based Local Route Repair in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper tackles the routing issue in mobile ad hoc networks by introducing a novel approach. The most challenging issue, when designing a routing protocol in this context, is the mobility of nodes, which engenders frequent links breakage. Therefore, most of research effort in this field should be conducted in this sense so that routing protocol will not be affected by route failures caused by link disconnections. The proposed routing protocol, called on-demand routing protocol with tabu search based local route repair, uses an intelligent technique to locally repair the failed routes. The idea is to connect the two parts of the failed route using minimum overhead and without generating loops. Hence, when a route is failed, a special packet containing a tabu list of upstream nodes (nodes of the first part the route) is launched with a minimum time-to-leave value. The motivation on using a local route repair approach rather than a new route discovery process is to save delay and to reduce control packet overhead, which leads to less network contention and less packets drop. However, this technique can lead longer routes between nodes, consequently, network performances will be worsened. To avoid this kind of situation, destination node invalidates the route when the number of repairs overtakes a given limit. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol achieves better in terms of communication delay, packet delivery ratio and control packet overhead than existing AODV-BFABL, DSR and AOMDV.