RTT-based optimal waiting time for best route selection in ad hoc routing protocols

Routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are usually classified into two categories, proactive and reactive. Unlike proactive routing protocols, which maintain and update their routing tables periodically, reactive routing protocols do not discover routes until they are requested. Therefore, reactive protocols consume less system resources and produce less control overheads comparing to proactive protocols. However, the biggest drawback of reactive protocols is their large route discovery latency. It is this undesired character of reactive protocols that incurs the most criticism. In this paper, we propose a dynamic RTT-based algorithm which can dramatically reduce the route discovery latency. This algorithm can be generally applied to any source selection based reactive routing protocols. Our simulation study has also shown some interesting results about packet traversal time and route discovery latency in a contention-based channel like IEEE 802.11 which have not been discussed before.