Optimal Path Selection Routing Protocol in MANETs

An Ad hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes forming a temporary network without the help of any centralized access point or existing infrastructure. In such an environment, routing protocols are required to transfer packets from source to destination as some mobile nodes can act as intermediate nodes to forward a packet to its destination, due to the limited range of each mobile node’s wireless transmissions. Dynamic source routing (DSR) is one of the routing protocols used for ad hoc networks. In this, When a node requires a route to a destination, it initiates a route discovery process within the network. Source node broadcasts a route request (R REQ) packet to its neighbors, which then forward the request to their neighbors, and so on, until a route is found or all possible route permutations have been examined. The main disadvantage of DSR protocol is that source node contains at most one route to destination at any moment of time. So, there is no way for the choice of optimal path for different type of applications like multimedia, voice, mail, etc. In this paper, a new protocol (DSR-A) is proposed which selects route from source to destination depending on bandwidth requirement of source node and battery life of all the nods on a path from source to destination.