Increasing packet delivery ratio in DSR by link prediction

Most existing on-demand mobile ad hoc network routing protocols continue using a route until a link breaks. During the route reconstruction, packets can be dropped, which will cause significant throughput degradation. In this paper, we add a link breakage prediction algorithm to the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. The mobile node uses signal power strength from the received packets to predict the link breakage time, and sends a warning to the source node of the packet if the link is soon-to-be-broken. The source node can perform a pro-active route rebuild to avoid disconnection. Experiments demonstrate that adding link breakage prediction to DSR can significantly reduce the total number of dropped data packets (by at least 20%). The tradeoff is an increase in the number of control messages by at most 33.5%. We also found that the proactive route maintenance does not cause significant increase in average packet latency and average route length. Enhanced route cache maintenance based on the link status can further reduce the number of dropped packets.