An on-demand routing protocol with flow control for mobile backbone networks

We have recently introduced a mobile backbone network (MBN) based architecture to support applications for ad hoc wireless networks. In the MBN, a group of backbone capable nodes are elected as backbone nodes to constitute a mobile backbone. The paper introduces a so-called mobile backbone network routing with flow control (MBNR-FC). By selectively flooding route discovery messages solely across the mobile backbone, MBNR-FC significantly reduces routing control overhead, leading to a highly scalable and robust mobile ad hoc network operation. We show that under high traffic loading, the MBNR-FC yields much better throughput and delay jitter performance than that exhibited by generic on-demand routing protocols. A flow control algorithm is designed and embedded in the MBNR-FC to guide admitted traffic to traverse areas that are less congested. Our study shows that the MBNR-FC method significantly improves network throughput as well as packet delay, delay jitter, and loss ratio performance.