An Energy Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol Based on Signal Strength for Mobile Ad-hoc Network

In recent years, Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) is one of the popular research areas due to low cost to employ the network, self-organization, freedom of location, and no base stations. Broadcast and data aggregation are crucial operations in MANETs. Due to the high mobility of nodes and the transmission distance, nodes may change their positions rapidly and thus not only change the network topology but also make it impossible to keep a durable and regular data routing between two nodes, that can cause link failure. Recently, it has been argued that layered architecture is not suitable for wireless network. In an effort to improve the performance of MANETs, there has been increased in protocols that rely on cross-layer interaction between different layers. In this paper, a new Cross-layer Design among Network and Physical layers, called Signal Strength Based Stability (SSBS) is proposed to reduce the broadcast redundancy, minimize the routing overhead and increase stability of the transmission link by measuring signal strength changes of neighbour nodes. SSBS will request selective forward nodes depend on its signal strength value. The proposed algorithm was simulated, and the packet delivery ratio including routing overhead was selected as the main performance evaluation metrics. The results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance over the conventional DSR protocol having implemented with blind flooding, and also improves the performance of on demand routing protocols of MANETs by reducing the communication overhead incurred during the route discovery process on DSR protocol.