A Multi-Tracking Wireless Ad Hoc Routing Protocol

Routing of data between source and destination nodes in a wireless ad hoc network has been a great challenge and has been under investigation by several researchers due to the dynamic topology of such networks. In this network, a multi- tracking routing protocol is proposed, where the source nodes track the progress and "cooperativeness" of their neighbors to improve their end-to-end delay and throughput performance as well as the overall network performance. To this end, source nodes keep alternative routes in their cache via a set of neighbors and the set is updated periodically according to certain metrics such as the load or power level of the existing neighbors. The performance of the multi-tracking routing protocol is studied for a small-size ad hoc wireless network in the presence of node failures and is compared with dynamic source routing and load-balancing based routing protocols for three different initial topologies, i.e., grid, random and degree-limited.