Stability Aware Routing: Exploiting Transient Route Availability in MANETs

The highly dynamic character of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) poses significant challenges on network communications and resource management. Previous work on routing in MANETs has resulted in numerous routing protocols that aim at satisfying constraints such as minimum hop/distance or low energy. Existing routing protocols often fail to discover stable routes between source and sink when route availability is transient, e.g., due to mobile devices switching their network cards into low-power sleep modes whenever no communication is taking place. In this paper, we introduce a stability aware dynamic source routing protocol (SA-DSR) that is capable of predicting the stability (i.e., expiration time) of multiple routes. SA-DSR then selects the route that minimizes hop count while staying available for the expected duration of packet transmission. Comparisons of SA-DSR to the original DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) protocol indicate a significant (up to 31%) increase in successful packet transmissions with comparable route establishment and maintenance overheads.