A Combined Routing Method for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Several simulation and real world studies show that certain ad hoc routing protocols perform better than others under specific mobility and traffic patterns. In order to exploit this phenomena, we propose a novel approach to adapt a network to changing conditions; we introduce “a combined routing method” that allows the network to seamlessly swap from one routing protocol to another protocol dynamically, while routing continues uninterrupted. By creating a thin new virtual layer, we enable each node in the ad hoc wireless network notify each other about the protocol swap and we do not make any changes to existing routing protocols. To ensure that routing works efficiently after the protocol swap, we reuse information from the previous protocol’s routing table while initializing the data structures for the new routing protocol. We study the feasibility of our technique and the overheads incurred while swapping between AODV, ODMRP and APRL under different network topologies and traffic patterns through detailed simulations. Our results show that the swap latency is related to the nature of the destination protocol and the topology of the network. We also find that the control packet ratio of a routing protocol during and after a swap is close to that of the protocol running before a swap, thus indicating that our approach does not add excessive overhead.