Thèse présentée pour obtenir le grade de docteur de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), represent an emerging class of networks in which wireless mobile nodes operate independent of a backbone infrastructure. While hosts in traditional networks often rely on a designated router to forward data, every host in a MANET is required to route and forward data. The network hosts, such as laptops and personal digital assistants, operate on constrained battery power, and limited CPU and storage capacity. These networks suffer from scarce channel bandwidth resulting in throughput decrease, which decreases even further due to the effects of signal interference, and channel fading. Consequently, they rely on innovative network layer routing techniques to improve the reliability of the network, where specialized routing protocols are required, addressing some challenges such as the mobility of nodes and the resource constraints. Actually, most of the MANETs applications necessitate communication and coordination among a given set of nodes. Multicast routing protocols play an important role to provide this communication. It is always advantageous to use multicast rather than multiple unicast in the ad hoc environment, where bandwidth comes at a premium. Our goal in this thesis is to propose new routing mechanisms and protocols, in the context of unicast and multicast routing, satisfying several requirements such as robustness, efficiency, adaptability, and energy consumption. Our first contribution in this thesis addresses the unicast routing via proposing a routing mechanism that is adaptive to the frequent change in topology as well as the nodes' battery power constraint. Our mechanism, named Energy Conserving Dynamic Source Routing (EC-DSR), modifies the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol taking into consideration the neighbors stability as well as the energy consumption during the paths' construction. We also tackle the problem of providing efficient multicast routing in ad hoc networks. In this context, we propose a new mesh-based multicast routing protocol, named Source Routing-based Multicast Protocol (SRMP). SRMP uses the source routing concept and provides stable links with strong connectivity. In our approach, we address the connectivity quality concept in order to provide robustness, efficiency, and energy conserving. Subsequently, we studied the performance evaluation of our propositions. We carried out our performance evaluation through simulations (under ns-2). Firstly, we implemented our unicast mechanism and compared its performance with DSR. Then we implemented our proposed multicast protocol and compared its performance with On-demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) and Adaptive Demand-driven Multicast Routing (ADMR) protocol. We considered different mobility models in our performance evaluation, …