A Quorum-Based Route Cache Maintenance Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

The objective of this paper is to propose a quorum- based robust and efficient routing protocol (QRERP) for mobile Ad Hoc network. There are four phases in the proposed QRERP. They are initialization phase, route discovery phase, route reply phase and data transmission phases. In initialization phase, the entire network is partitioned into several connected subgraph. Each subgraph is represented by a host adjacency matrix (HAM) and a logical coterie tree. In the route discovery phase, a route can be discovered by local matrix computation, quorum-based routing table query or quorum-based flooding mechanism. When a route is established, a packet can be replied from destination to source node and the route information can be distributed to the set of coteries passed through by this routing path. Finally, after the routing path is confirmed by route reply packet, source node can communication with destination. During the data transmission, when route is broken due to node mobility or power exhausted, a route maintenance mechanism can be triggered to mainline the robustness of the routing path. The performance of the proposed QRERP is demonstrated by experimental results. From the results, we can conclude that the proposed approach has advantages of backup route, less control overhead, mobility maintenance and route maintenance.