Reducing Latency and Overhead of Route Repair with Controlled Flooding

Ad hoc routing protocols that use broadcast for route discovery may be inefficient if the path between any source-destination pair is frequently broken. We propose and evaluate a simple mechanism that allows fast route repair in on demand ad hoc routing protocols. We apply our proposal to the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. The proposed system is based on the Controlled Flooding (CF) framework, where alternative routes are established around the main original path between source-destination pairs. With alternative routing, data packets are forwarded through a secondary path without requiring the source to re-flood the whole network, as may be the case in AODV. We are interested in one-level alternative routing. We show that our proposal reduces the connection disruption probability as well as the frequency of broadcasts.