Signal strength-based routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have many applications in the civilian environment, law enforcement, military and disaster recovery arenas. To facilitate these applications, with heavy traffic among nodes, a stable and efficient routing protocol is crucial. In this paper, a signal strength-based, on-demand routing protocol has been proposed, which first uses the earliest established path to forward packets, then changes to the strongest signal strength path for long transmissions. Through exhaustive simulation on ns-2, our routing showed superior performance for various system parameters in a Ricean fading environment. When combined with a multi-rate MAC protocol, the performance was even more distinguished.