Proposal and demonstration of link connectivity assessment based enhancements to routing in mobile ad-hoc networks

Wireless ad-hoc networking can be employed to build inter-vehicle communication based applications. The associated hostile driving environment and high mobility exposes the routing protocol to a more dynamically changing topology. In this work we investigate and demonstrate the application of link-connectivity assessment to efficient ad-hoc routing. A framework for enhancements is delineated and incorporated in the implementation of OLSR protocol. For performance assessment we deploy a topology consisting of vehicles bearing laptop computers equipped with IEEE 802.11b compliant equipment. Experiments are conducted in a typical environment and routing performance is evaluated based on the UDP packet throughput and round trip time. It is demonstrated that the link quality assessment based enhancements improve the performance of OLSR. The improved scheme will be referred to as SBRS-OLSR (signal strength assessment based routing enhancements) in this paper.