Strategies for broadcasting updates by proactive routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

Proactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks are table-driven, where each node tries to maintain routing information about every other node in the network at all times. Mobility of the nodes in the network causes creation of new links or breaking of old links, changing network routes dynamically. These changes require a proactive routing protocol to regularly broadcast updates in the network to enable other nodes to maintain correct routing information. The performance of a proactive protocol depends on the particular strategy the protocol uses to broadcast these updates. The updating strategies used by the current proactive protocols to broadcast detected link changes in the network are found to be inefficient. We propose three new strategies for broadcasting proactive updates in the network. Analysis of these updating schemes using simulations shows that the proposed schemes lead to significant savings in the amount of routing control traffic generated in the network. At the same time, the performance of these schemes is satisfactory in terms of the data throughput, route success rate, etc. For example, for a moderately sized network, simulation results show that the proposed schemes can lead to more than 45% savings in terms of routing control traffic, while maintaining decent performance of the network.