Effects of backup routes and cache timeout mechanism on reliable source routing in mobile ad-hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of mobile hosts capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of any base stations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive cache timeout mechanism for the known MANET routing protocol BSR (backup source routing), which establishes and maintains backup routes that can be utilized after the primary path breaks. In order to explore quantitatively the two techniques, namely backup routes and cache timeout mechanism, we have also produced a comprehensive simulation study. The experimental results show that both of them affect the performance of routing protocols. Especially, we have observed the following two features: (1) the backup route mechanism seems to be a significant factor in most cases, and (2) the cache timeout mechanism has a notable performance improvement in the situations with a high level of mobility.