A Reliable Routing Algorithm in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

To provide reliable transmission in wireless ad hoc networks, two problems need to be solved. The first one is to find reliable routes for packets transmission. And the second one is to re-route packets as soon as possible when route failures occur. Aiming at solving these two problems, this paper proposes a reliable routing algorithm called QDSR by making two improvements to DSR. Integrating ETX (expected transmission count) into DSR, QDSR can ignore links that are apt to break down and can find high-throughput paths on multi-hop wireless networks. The new route recovery mechanism used in QDSR can help salvage packets from the failure node instead of initiating route discovery from the source node again. Simulation results demonstrate that the number of inefficient routes picked out by QDSR is much less than that in DSR, even if there are route failures, QDSR can recovery the route as soon as possible.