Load-aware destination-controlled routing for MANETs

An ad hoc wireless mobile network is an infrastructure-less mobile network that has no fixed routers; instead, all nodes are capable of movement and can be connected dynamically in an arbitrary manner. In order to facilitate communication of mobile nodes that may not be within the wireless range of each other, an efficient routing protocol is used to discover routes between nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. In this paper, we present a novel Load-Balanced Ad hoc Routing (LBAR) protocol for communication in wireless ad hoc networks. LBAR defines a new metric for routing known as the degree of nodal activity to represent the load on a mobile node. In LBAR routing information on all paths from source to destination are forwarded through setup messages to the destination. Setup messages include nodal activity information of all nodes on the traversed path. After collecting information on all possible paths, the destination then makes a selection of the path with the best-cost value and sends an acknowledgement to the source node. LBAR also provides an alternate path maintenance technique to patch up broken links by detouring traffic to the destination. A comprehensive simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Performance results show that LBAR outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols in terms of packet delivery and average end-to-end delay. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.