A system and traffic dependent adaptive routing algorithm for ad hoc networks

An ad hoc network consists of a number of mobile hosts who communicate with each other over a wireless channel without any centralized control. The basic problem is to obtain a distributed routing scheme so that under the network connectivity assumption any mobile host can transmit/receive data from any other host in the network. In this paper we propose a new routing algorithm for ad hoc networks. The proposed algorithm uses a more appropriate distance measure given by the expected delay along a path, instead of the number of hops used in most of the existing algorithms. This metric allows the algorithm to adapt to changes not only in the topology of the network, but also in the traffic intensity. The algorithm uses a novel technique for estimating the path delays without requiring the links to be bidirectional or the clocks at the nodes in the network to be synchronized. The proposed algorithm is able to perform both reliable and good routing with low communication overhead and computational requirements