Autonomic Tuning of Routing for MANETs

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), timers have been widely used to maintain routing (state) information. The use of fixed-interval timers is simple to implement but, in practise, may be difficult to configure in dynamic operational environments, and so may give reduced performance in the presence of frequent topology changes. This paper proposes a self-tuning timer approach within a simple control system for MANET routing protocols with the aim of allowing dynamic, autonomic, re-calibration of routing update frequencies. A novel dynamic timer algorithm is presented to automatically tune routing performance by adapting timer intervals to network conditions. Our simulation results have shown that, compared to the default fixed timer approach, the proposed algorithm could effectively improve routing throughput without manual configuration.