Improving Performance of On-demand Routing under Multipath Fading

Despite many routing protocols proposed for mobile ad hoc networks few have considered link quality and route stability. Weak links contained in the routes often lead to route breaks. Multipath fading and mobility make link quality time-variant. When the link metric is associated with link quality the routes may change frequently. In times of transmission failure due to collision or fading, the routing packets are susceptible to loss owing to the lack of retransmission mechanism for the broadcast packets. For these reasons, the routes become unstable. In this paper, we investigate the long-term link quality and route stability in the on-demand routing protocols. We compare the link metric policies, optimize the route discovery and use the soft detection scheme to avoid false link breaks. The simulation results show that both packet error ratio (PER) and throughput in the enhanced on-demand routing protocol can be greatly improved under the Rayleigh fading environment