Path stability based source routing in mobile Ad hoc networks

It is a challenging task for Ad hoc networks to design routing protocols which is used to efficiently find a path between two communicating nodes due to its node mobility, thus stability of selected path is of prime importance. In this paper, a path stability based routing algorithm PSB_DSR is proposed. PSB_DSR selects a stable path while minimizing hop counts instead of selecting shortest path used by DSR. Link stability factor (LSF) and path stability factor (PSF) are defined and used in route discovery process. Simulation results show the proposed PSB_DSR can select a stable path and avoid frequent link breaks, thus reduce rerouting operations and gain an improvement in packet delivery ratio and ETE delay.