Distributed mobility-aware route selection for wireless ad hoc networks

• Authors: S. Abhyankar;D. P. Agrawal
• Venue: PCC '02 Proceedings of the Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference, 2002. on 21st IEEE International
• Year: 2002

An ad hoc wireless network does not have any fixed communication infrastructure, so it allows a more flexible model of communication than traditional networks. For any active connection in an ad hoc network, the end hosts as well as the intermediate nodes, which relay the information, can be mobile. Therefore under moderate mobility, end users experience frequent disconnections of established path. While using a reliable transmission scheme like TCP or time critical applications like multimedia in such an environment, it is important to minimize the disruption of existing paths. Current research in this area has focused on developing mobility-based clusters with less mobile nodes as clusterheads for ad hoc network, rather than on the challenges involved in using mobility predictions for routing. In this paper we propose distributed mobility-aware route selection (DMARS) for improving performance of existing routing protocols using mobility predictions. A mobility metric, which exploits nonrandom behaviors of mobility patterns, is used to select more stable routes and reduce the routing overhead caused by user mobility. We then evaluate the effectiveness of DMARS via extensive simulations.