A novel distributed routing protocol to support ad-hoc mobile computing

This paper presents a new, simple and bandwidth-efficient distributed routing protocol for ad-hoc mobile networks. Unlike the conventional distributed routing algorithms, our protocol does not attempt to consistently maintain routing information in every node. In an ad-hoc mobile network where mobile hosts are acting as routers and where routes are made inconsistent by mobile host movements, we employ a new associativity-based routing scheme where a route is selected based on nodes having associativity states that imply periods of stability. In this manner, the routes selected are likely to be long-lived and hence there is no need to restart frequently, resulting in higher attainable throughput. The association property also allows the integration of ad-hoc routing into a BS-oriented wireless LAN environment, providing fault tolerance in times of base station (BS) failures. The protocol is free from loops, deadlock and packet duplicates and has scalable memory requirements. Simulation results obtained reveal that shorter and better routes can be discovered during route re-constructions.