Link life based routing protocol for ad hoc wireless networks

Due to the highly dynamic topology and absence of any fixed infrastructure, stability of selected path is of prime importance in ad hoc networks. The frequent route failure and high control overhead in routing protocols lead to degraded system performance. This paper proposes a stability based distributed adaptive routing protocol for ad hoc networks, which uses the worst case lifetime of wireless links, which is obtained by linear regression of the variation of distance between nodes as the routing metric. An efficient beaconing mechanism, load balancing, pro-active and reactive route reconfiguration mechanisms are also studied with the protocol. The protocol is supported with simulation using GloMoSim