Routing based on link expiration time for MANET performance improvement

Connectivity failures between nodes, resulting from nodes movement, are a major problem in MANETs. Indeed, many approaches have been developed to predict the quality of connections and the link expiration time. In this paper, we present a performance study of MANET that uses routing based on link expiration time prediction. We propose three prediction algorithms based on either the Global Positioning System (GPS), or the signal strength (SS), or both. The aim is to enable ad hoc mobile nodes to predict the remaining connectivity time with their neighbors in order to avoid disconnections. In this study we use Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol with several modifications that enable integration of link expiration time metric although it should be noted that this metric could be used with other ad hoc routing protocols. Simulations results show that our approach can improve significantly the network performance.