Enhancing the TORA protocol using network localization and selective node participation

The Temporally-Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) is a distributed routing protocol that is based on a family of link reversal algorithms. TORA is able to provide multiple loop-free routes to any destination using the route creation, maintenance and erasure functions. TORA performs well in networks with a small number of traffic connections but poorly in networks with a large number of traffic connections. This poor performance is due to the traffic congestion caused by excessive route maintenance. This traffic congestion is further aggravated by routing overhead produced by the large number of traffic connections. We propose two modifications to improve TORA using a network localization approach and selective node participation approach. The network localization approach initializes and maintains a localized portion of the entire network while the selective node participation approach selects a subset of nodes to participate as part of the network. Benchmarks against original TORA show that our TORA modifications results in an overall performance improvement in terms of packet delivery, routing overhead and packet latency.