Cost Adaptive Mechanism to Provide Network Diversity for Manet Reactive Routing Protocols

We develop a Cost Adaptive Mechanism (CAM) that can be used with any MANET reactive routing protocol employing a route discovery mechanism. Through CAM, various link cost metrics are gathered, including transmission power required on a link, remaining battery life, and traffic load of each node. A route selection time window is introduced to allow the destination node and the source node to select among viable routes according to current network needs, thereby providing a level of network diversity. We evaluate the performance of CAM and present our preliminary results.