Strategies for finding stable paths in mobile wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, we introduce statistical methods to estimate the stability of paths in a mobile wireless ad hoc environment. Identifying stable paths helps to reduce control traffic and the number of connection interruptions. By means of simulation, we analyse the stability of paths chosen according to a variety of strategies, including those used by the well-known routing protocols, AODV and DSR, under a variety of different mobility patterns. This offers new insights into the relation between a path´s stability and other characteristics and shows that our statistical metrics are able to identify stable paths in a wide range of scenarios.