Title: Routing protocols to determine stable paths and trees using the inverse of predicted link expiration times for mobile ad hoc networks

Authors: Natarajan Meghanathan

Addresses: Jackson State University, Mailbox 18839, 1400 John R. Lynch Street, Jackson, MS 39217, USA

Abstract: The high-level contribution of this paper is the design and development of routing protocols to discover stable paths and trees for unicast and multicast communication based on the predicted link expiration times (LETs) of links in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Both of the stability-based unicast (SILET) and multicast (MILET) routing protocols discover routes through an on-demand request-reply cycle with a link weight being 1 plus the inverse of the LET of the link. The destination nodes and the multicast receiver nodes connect to the source node through paths that have the lowest sum of the link weights. The inclusion of a '1' in the link weight helps to minimise the hop count of the paths from the source node to each of the targeted end nodes of the communication session; the inclusion of the inverse of the LET in the path/tree optimisation function helps to maximise the path/tree lifetime. The proposed protocols effectively neutralise the stability-hop count tradeoff and are able to simultaneously maximise the path/tree lifetime and minimise the hop count per source-destination/source-receiver path. The performance of SILET and MILET has been extensively studied in the ns-2 simulator along with contemporary unicast and multicast routing protocols.

Keywords: unicast communication; multicast communication; stability; hop count; routing protocols; mobile ad hoc networks; MANETs; link expiration times; LET; stable paths; stable trees; mobile networks; optimisation; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMNDI.2012.054463

International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation, 2012 Vol.4 No.4, pp.214 - 234

Published online: 25 Oct 2014 *

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