OHO: Overhearing on-demand route repair mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

MANETs is mobile networks with no infrastructure. The main characteristic of MANETs is mobility, which causes dynamic changing of topology and link failure. Route repair mechanism, which is initiated after link failure occurred, broadcasts route request messages to the network to find a new route. Finally, there are only a few nodes selected to be the member of the new active route. That means most of the route request messages squander energy of nodes that are not the member of the new active route as well. In this paper, we propose a novel route repair mechanism that can save energy of nodes in an overall. The key feature is to overhear information from packets traveling around. Therefore the route repair can be successful with less overhead than the conventional routing protocol such as AODV by using overhear information. Simulation results show that our proposed route repair mechanism can improve performance in terms of energy. The average improvement of energy is 24% and reducing the overhead of network about 30% to 50% when comparing to the conventional AODV.