Coverage based route maintenance in MANET routing protocol

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure less, wireless network consisting of a set of mobile nodes. Due to frequent movement of nodes, the network topology of MANET always changes, which affects the network connectivity as a whole. Dynamic topology can be chosen as one of the main factors which affect the performance of MANET routing protocols. Many protocols have been proposed, with the goal of achieving efficient routing. These protocols differ in the approach used for searching a new route or modifying an existing route to make off with the dynamic topology. Route discovery and route maintenance are two areas were an efficient routing protocol becomes helpful. In this paper, we propose a coverage based hybrid routing method. In this method, we first create a Cover-set for each node, which is calculated using the coverage area of the corresponding node. Both proactive and reactive methods are used to find an appropriate route according to the position of destination node in the Cover-set. The maintenance of a broken path is efficiently carried out by varying the radius of Cover-set. Finally, the comparisons results show that the proposed routing method outperforms ZRP, which is a hybrid routing, protocol.