A Radio-Link Stability-based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The dynamics of mobile ad-hoc NETworks (MANET), as a consequence of mobility of mobile hosts, pose the problem in finding stable multi-hop routes for effective communication between any pair of source and destination. In this paper, a novel stability-based ad hoc routing protocol is proposed, which considers both radio link affinity and route stability in MANETs. In the proposed protocol, which is named as ad-hoc on-demand stability vector (AOSV) routing protocol, a link/route stability estimation method and a novel path finding algorithm are developed to find out and maintain stable routes for dynamically required communications services in MANETs. A stochastic mobile-to-mobile radio propagation model is constructed for the estimation of the radio link stability as well as the stability of multi-hop route. With the awareness of stabilities of radio links and eligible routes in a MANET, the path finding algorithm is designed to explore the stable route with largest route stability for a given source and destination pair. The performance of AOSV is compared with the well-known ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. Simulation results indicate that the AOSV routing protocol leads to significant throughput increases by 5% to 68% improvement comparing to AODV.