A Fault Resilient Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In a Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET), mobile devices cooperate to forward packets for each other without the assistance of dedicated routing infrastructures. Due to its networking flexibility and node mobility, MANET routing presents a new set of nontrivial challenges such as broadcast overhead, frequent topology changes, and slow convergence. Additionally, many proposed MANET routing protocols assume a friendly and cooperative environment, and hence are vulnerable to various attacks by misbehaving nodes. Recently, significant attention has been devoted to developing the fault resilient routing protocol for MANET, which requires routing stability and scalability in hostile and demanding environments. In this paper, we propose a fault resilient ad hoc routing protocol called local self-recovery routing (LSR), that is geared to adapt to topology dynamics and selfish behaviors in the shortest possible time. During the route recovery, the shortest detour is found to repair the faulty links locally using a cone-shaped recovery zone, and the broadcast area is efficiently chosen to minimize overhead while achieving a good recovery rate. Our ns-2 based simulation shows significant performance enhancements of LSR in throughput and routing overhead. Also, based on the simulation, the optimal angle of a cone-shaped recovery zone is studied under various scenarios.