A hop-count and time based MANET routing protocol

Routing packets towards their destinations is a key task in mobile ad-hoc networks due to nodal mobility and dynamic topology of the network. Many well performing routing protocols for MANETs are proposed and implemented by considering these inherent properties. ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one such protocol which performs better among similar MANET routing protocols. AODV chooses a route based on either a fresh sequence number or on the lowest hop-count. There exist many enhancements to AODV, which exhibit a better performance compared to the original one. In a larger network, for a given destination, different paths that have the same hop-count can be found. When we consider the efficiency of such paths in faster data transmission, their performance vary in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput etc., due to the mobility of nodes. AODV and its enhancements do not consider such cases and in this paper, we propose an enhanced hop-count and packet travel time based enhanced routing algorithm, named ht-AODV. Our experimental results show that the ht-AODV outperforms the AODV and one of its recent enhancements AOMDV, in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio, especially with increasing network size.