PATCH: a novel local recovery mechanism for mobile ad-hoc networks

On-demand routing protocol is an important category of the current ad-hoc routing protocols, in which a route between a communicating node pair is discovered only on demand. However, due to the dynamic and mobile nature of the nodes, intermediate nodes in the route tend to lose connection with each other during the communication process. When this occurs, an end-to-end route discovery is typically performed to establish a new connection for the communication. Such route repair mechanism causes high control overhead and long packet delay. In this paper, we propose a proximity approach to connection healing (PATCH) local recovery mechanism, which aims to reduce the control overhead and achieve fast recovery when route breakage happens. It is shown that PATCH is simple, robust and effective. We present simulation results to illustrate the performance benefits of using PATCH mechanism.