Provisioning of adaptability to variable topologies for routing schemes in MANETs

Frequent changes in network topologies caused by mobility in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) impose great challenges to designing routing schemes for such networks. Various routing schemes each aiming at particular type of MANET (e.g., flat or clustered MANETs) with different mobility degrees (e.g., low, medium, and high mobility) have been proposed in the literature. However, since a mobile node should not be limited to operate in a particular MANET assumed by a routing scheme, an important issue is how to enable a mobile node to achieve routing performance as high as possible when it roams across different types of MANETs. To handle this issue, a quantity that can predict the link status for a time period in the future with the consideration of mobility is required. In this paper, we discuss such a quantity and investigate how well this quantity can be used by the link caching scheme in the dynamic source routing protocol to provide the adaptability to variable topologies caused by mobility through computer simulation in NS-2.