An in-depth analysis of the effects of IMEP on TORA protocol

The Temporally-Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) is a highly adaptive distributed routing algorithm used in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) that provides multiple loop-free routes to a destination. TORA is very dependent on the services provided by the Internet MANET Encapsulation Protocol (IMEP) to carry out its three main functions: route creation, route maintenance, and route erasure. In this paper, we study how certain behaviour of IMEP leads to the poor performance of TORA and narrow down the problems of IMEP. We also proposed two modifications to IMEP that resulted in an overall performance improvement of TORA in terms of packet delivery, routing overhead and average packet latency. The original TORA and TORA based on our two IMEP modifications were also benchmarked against two other on-demand routing protocols: the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol and Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol.