Mobility and Density Self-Adaptive Routing Strategies in Ad Hoc Networks

Network conditions suddenly and unpredictably vary in wireless ad hoc networks. Ad hoc protocols should adjust their behavior to network dynamics in order to improve their performance. Hierarchical routing makes ad hoc routing protocols more scalable with respect to the network size while flat protocols are well adapted to small networks. Therefore, a main routing adaptation is to switch between a Structure-Less routing to a Structure-Extended one according to network conditions. These network conditions are expressed in terms of node mobility and node density. This paper presents a framework to dynamically adapt the routing mode. Different adaptation metrics are discussed and the example of the cluster source routing extension combined to the dynamic source routing protocol illustrates the routing adaptation strategy