An Average Link Interference-Aware Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The intrinsic flexibility and independence of infrastructure enable mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) to be widely used in various environments such as disaster rescue, and battlefield. Recently, researches have shown that interference can impose a significant impact on the performance of a MANET. However, there is no unified definition of interference in MANETs currently. Therefore, in this paper, we first introduce an explicit definition of interference. Based on this definition, we present a series of formulas for computing node-interference, link-interference and path-interference, and then propose an interference-aware routing protocol selecting paths with the minimum average link-interference between the source and destination. Paths found by our protocol tend to avoid the areas with high interferences, reducing the number of collisions and packet retransmissions, resulting in higher network throughput and longer lifetime. We implement our average link interference-aware routing protocol (ALIR) on dynamic source routing (DSR). The simulation results illustrate that our protocol is able to achieve better performance than DSR.