An Adaptive hybrid routing strategy (AHRS) for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. Although MANETs are easily deployed, they have several constraints such as; continuously changing topology, distributed operations, limitations of nodes radio interface. Recently, Ad-Hoc routing has become an important area of research due to the massive increase in wireless devices. Routing in MANETs is based on a cooperative multi-hop manner. However, due to the highly dynamic topology routing in MANETs is a true challenge. In this paper, we propose a new routing strategy for MANETs called Adaptive Hybrid Routing Strategy (AHRS). The basic idea of AHRS is to inform the network mobile nodes continuously with any changes in the network topology without flooding the network by a huge amount of control messages. AHRS is a hybrid routing strategy that can estimate failure time of links between network nodes through the historical information about link status. Accordingly, AHRS introduces not only the shortest available routes for data transmission, but also elects those reliable ones. AHRS uses no periodic routing advertisement messages but employs a special packet called 'Carriage' instead, thereby reducing the network bandwidth overhead and minimizing end-to-end transmission delay. AHRS has been compared against several well-known protocols, which are; DSDV, ZRP, AODV and DSR. Experimental results have shown that AHRS outperforms all competitive protocols as it introduces the minimal routing overheads, as well as a fast route delivery.