A Flexible Routing Decision Framework to Support Diversified Application-Level Data Types in MANETs

Owing to the technological advances in computing power and wireless communications, applications that used to be only accessible on desktop computers are increasingly run-able on wireless devices. As a result, a wireless device user may run several applications at the same time, and these different applications may generate different data types. In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) environment, which is popular among wireless device users, different data types may impose different routing considerations and prefer using different routing criteria. To support diversified routing requirements and to achieve efficient routing for applications with different data types, this paper proposes a novel Flexible Routing Decision (FRD) framework. The framework supports several routing metric types in one platform. It allows users to weigh, rank and use different types of routing metrics to select different routes on an individual application basis. It is expected that this approach could help users to find a route that is most suited to their application requirements.