Weighted Critical Path Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Designing a routing protocol that can adapt to the changes in the underlying network conditions, as well as incorporating a minimum overhead is a challenging task for ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we present the Weighted Critical Path Routing (WCPR) protocol that strives to incorporate the merits of reactive and proactive ad hoc routing schemes. The aim of our work is to achieve low latency between highly active pairs of nodes, thus increasing the overall performance of the network without dramatically increasing the routing overhead. The genuine aspect of WCPR is that it initially starts-off as a conventional reactive Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The network traffic is monitored in attempt to gradually discover pairs of highly interactive nodes in the network. Critical Paths are then constructed between these pairs of nodes and proactively safe guarded. The established CPs are treated differently depending on the amount of traffic consumed by each. WCPR is evaluated through simulation experiments and proved to outperform DSR in terms of delay with minimal increase in overhead.