Mobility assessment on-demand (MAOD) routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In ad hoc wireless networks, the high mobility of hosts is usually a major reason for link failures. The general 'shortest path' based routing protocols may not lead to stable routes. In this paper, we propose a mobility assessment on-demand (MAOD) routing protocol to select a stable route in order to enhance system throughput and performance. An error count parameter is used to judge whether a host is highly mobile. The proposed MAOD routing protocol is an on-demand routing protocol similar to dynamic source routing (DSR). The difference between MAOD and DSR is in the path selection method. Because MAOD takes the mobility of hosts into consideration, it will select a more stable and reliable path than DSR. In comparison, DSR only considers whether this route is a shortest path or not. Finally, the system performance is analyzed by using the global mobile simulation (GloMoSim) simulator. We can observe that MAOD routing protocol outperforms DSR routing protocol especially in the high mobility environment. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.