An agent based framework to find stable routes in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs)

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have emerged as one of the most significant areas of research in the field of mobile computing. However, the mobility and disconnection of mobile hosts pose a number of problems in designing proper routing schemes for effective communication between any source and destination. In order to facilitate communication within the network, a routing protocol is used to discover routes between nodes. In this paper, we propose an on demand routing protocol based on stability of the links in between mobile nodes. It consists of a set of agents such as node manager agent (NMA), link management agent (LMA), and route discovery agent (RDA). The proposed scheme operates in the following sequence. (1) Hello messages are exchanged by all the nodes in the entire network to identify their neighbors. (2) Calculation of link expiry time of the associated links with each node. (3) Trigger mobile agents at source node to the destination to find available paths (routes). (4) Calculate the route expiry time for all the available routes at source node. (5) Identify the route which is having highest route expiry time as a stable route from source to destination. The motivation for this work is to decrease the effect of high-mobility on the performance of network, thus reach a higher performance with reduced overhead, lower probability of link breakage and higher throughput. The scheme has been simulated in various network scenarios to test operation effectiveness. Proposed scheme offers flexible and adaptable stable route discovery process in MANETs.