Routing with Load Balancing in Ad Hoc Network: A Mobile Agent Approach

An ad hoc wireless mobile network is an infrastructure-less network that has no fixed routes; 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 needed to discover routes between nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. Therefore in this paper, we propose routing with load balancing using mobile agent (RLBMA). We use the concept of mobile agent (MA) for route discovery and balance the traffic load on the route. This MA selects the disjoint (alternate) path called active path set (APS) for reliable transmission to avoid congestion. RLBMA provides topology updation and path maintenance also. A comprehensive simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Performance results shows that MA approach outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols in terms of packet delivery fraction, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing load.