A proxy based indirect routing scheme for ad hoc wireless networks

The majority of the existing ad hoc wireless network routing protocols has a tendency to use the shortest single path from the source to the destination. However, in constantly changing topologies such as those in mobile ad hoc networks, the shortest single path is quite unstable for reachability and also for traffic load equilibrium. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called Applicative Indirect Routing (AIR), to control network traffic congestion and refine the route availability by coping with unreliable links quickly. The proposed scheme, acting as a proactive routing protocol, utilizes additional information about the neighbors shared (defined as proxies) by the sender and receiver to find ondemand an alternative for the original path with unreliable links. The additional bandwidth usage in AIR to obtain the information about shared neighbors is so minimal that the bandwidth availability for data packets is not significantly affected. In our scheme, it is possible for the nodes to dynamically reroute incoming packets into alternative paths so the packets will reach their destinations even when the ideal routing path fails. The conducted simulation experiments show that AIR leads to a much improved system performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end packet delay, and network reliability as compared with a conventional proactive protocol, namely Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). AIR is also a competitive protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio as compared with two existing reactive protocols; namely Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR).