Congestion-Aware Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Congestion in mobile ad hoc networks leads to transmission delays and packet loss, and causes wastage of time and energy on recovery. Routing protocols which are adaptive to the congestion status of a mobile ad hoc network can greatly improve the network performance. In this paper, we propose a congestion-aware routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks which uses a metric incorporating data-rate, MAC overhead, and buffer delay to combat congestion. This metric is used, together with the avoidance of mismatched link data-rate routes, to make mobile ad hoc networks robust and adaptive to congestion.