Critical Path Routing (CPR) Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a network consisting of a set of wireless nodes capable of moving around freely while still being connected without any fixed infrastructure. In this paper we present a hybrid adaptive ad hoc routing protocol, named Critical Path Routing (CPR) that strives to incorporate the merits of both reactive and proactive ad hoc routing algorithms. The genuine aspect of CPR is that it initially starts-off as a conventional reactive Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Then, the network traffic is monitored in attempt to gradually discover information that identifies pairs of highly interactive nodes that engage in sending data to each other more often than other nodes in the MANET. CPR then constructs Critical Paths (CPs) between these pairs of nodes and proactively safe guards these CPs. The aim of our work is to achieve low latency between highly active pairs of nodes, thus increasing the overall performance of the network. Simulation results showed that CPR outclassed DSR with a decrease of 23.7% in end-to-end delay when nodes were in a high degree of mobility, but with a relatively high cost as overhead increased by 36%. We enhanced our CPR protocol in attempt to decrease the relatively high overhead by decreasing the engagement of intermediate nodes in the proactive monitoring of CPs. The total overhead decreased to only 14.74%.