Associativity-Based Routing for Ad-Hoc Mobile Networks

This paper presents a new, simple and bandwidth-efficient distributed routing protocol to support mobile computing in a conference size ad-hoc mobile network environment. Unlike the conventional approaches such as link-state and distance-vector distributed routing algorithms, our protocol does not attempt to consistently maintain routing information in every node. In an ad-hoc mobile network where mobile hosts (MHs) are acting as routers and where routes are made inconsistent by MHs' movement, we employ an associativity-based routing scheme where a route is selected based on nodes having associativity states that imply periods of stability. In this manner, the routes selected are likely to be long-lived and hence there is no need to restart frequently, resulting in higher attainable throughput. Route requests are broadcast on a per need basis. The association property also allows the integration of ad-hoc routing into a BS-oriented Wireless LAN (WLAN) environment, providing the fault tolerance in times of base stations (BSs) failures. To discover shorter routes and to shorten the route recovery time when the association property is violated, the localised-query and quick-abort mechanisms are respectively incorporated into the protocol. To further increase cell capacity and lower transmission power requirements, a dynamic cell size adjustment scheme is introduced. The protocol is free from loops, deadlock and packet duplicates and has scalable memory requirements. Simulation results obtained reveal that shorter and better routes can be discovered during route re-constructions.