Redundant source routing for real-time services in ad hoc networks

Quality-of-service in ad hoc networks is becoming more important with progress of the ad hoc networking research and development. In this paper, we proposed a new routing protocol named RSR for ad hoc networks. RSR is one type of redundant dispersity routing protocol. Through the judicious use of packet replication in RSR, the performance of network applications in ad hoc network is significantly enhanced. This enhancement is of great meaning for mission-critical applications with stringent delay requirement, especially in networks with frequently changing topologies. Both TCP and UDP traffic are used to evaluate the performance of RSR using DSR as the benchmark. The simulation results show that RSR improves the packet drop rate and end-to-end delay for UDP traffic and improves the end-to-end goodput for TCP traffic. RSR is a good candidate for QoS routing and fault-tolerant real-time services in ad hoc networks