A Novel Approach for an Optimized Route Discovery and Packet Forwarding for Ad-hoc Networks Using Multi Rate Routing Protocol

Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing is a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and other wireless ad-hoc networks. The traditional AODV protocol cannot address to multi rate PHY communications. In this project, we analyze the relationship between data rate, corresponding transmission range and number of hops in AODV protocol and find the optimal data rate for AODV control and data packets and effective routing metric. Then we propose a new cross-layer AODV routing protocol namely Multi-Rate AODV (MR-AODV) to establish efficient routes in the multi-rate wireless environments. MR-AODV propagates the RREQ packets at the optimum rate to disseminate them faster and the path selection algorithm chooses the best multi rate path for the communication. This also introduces a new routing metric namely path gain that is used to select the optimal route between the source and destination nodes. This approach acquires information from the MAC layer and rate controlling from the network layer. The performance of this enhancement has been evaluated by simulation using Network Simulator and results show significant improvement of the performance in multi-rate ad hoc network environments.