Reducing Latency and Overhead of Route Repair with Controlled Flooding

Ad hoc routing protocols that use broadcast for route discovery may be inefficient if the path between any source–destination pair is frequently broken. We propose and evaluate a simple mechanism that allows fast route repair in on demand ad hoc routing protocols. We apply our proposal to the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. The proposed system is based on the Controlled Flooding (CF) framework, where alternative routes are established around the main original path between source–destination pairs. With alternative routing, data packets are forwarded through a secondary path without requiring the source to re-flood the whole network, as may be the case in AODV. We are interested in one-level alternative routing. We show that our proposal reduces the connection disruption probability as well as the frequency of broadcasts.