Load-balanced wireless ad hoc routing

An ad hoc wireless mobile network is an infrastructureless mobile network that has no fixed routers; instead, all nodes are capable of movement and can be connected dynamically in an arbitrary manner. In order to facilitate communication of mobile nodes that may not be within the wireless range of each other, an efficient routing protocol is used to discover routes between nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. We present a novel load-balanced ad hoc routing (LBAR) protocol for communication in wireless ad hoc networks. LBAR defines a new metric for routing known as the degree of nodal activity. In LBAR, path discovery takes charge of searching routes and then selecting a route that has least traffic load and transmit traffic in a timely manner based on activity of the nodes. LBAR provides efficient path maintenance to patch up broken links by detouring traffic to the destination. A comprehensive simulation model was conducted to study the performance of the proposed scheme. Performance results show that LBAR outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols in terms of packet delivery and average end-to-end delay.