ARM: Anticipated Route Maintenance Scheme in Location-Aided Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are composed of moving wireless hosts which, within range of each other, form wireless networks. For communication to occur between hosts that are not within each other's range, routes involving intermediate nodes must be established; however, since the hosts may be in motion, a host that was part of a route may move away from its upstream and downstream partners, thus breaking the route. In this paper, we propose anticipated route maintenance (ARM) protocol with two extensions to route discovery based routing scheme: Extend the route when nodes on a link move apart from each other and they have common neighbor that can be 'inserted' in the path, and shrink route when a node discovers that one of its neighbor which is not the next hop is also on the same route several hops later on. By utilizing only local geographic information (now a part of some route finding algorithms), a host can anticipate its neighbor's departure and, if other hosts are available, choose a host to bridge the gap, keeping the path connected. We present a distributed algorithm that anticipates route failure and performs preventative route maintenance using location information to increase a route lifespan. The benefits are that this reduces the need to find new routes (which is very expensive) and prevents interruptions in service. As the density of nodes increases, the chance to successfully utilize our route maintenance approach increases, and so does the savings. We have compared the performance of two protocols, pure dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol and DSR with ARM. The simulation results show how ARM improves the functionality of DSR by preventing the links in the route from breaking. Packets delivery ratio could be increased using ARM and achieved approximately $\100%$ improvement. The simulations clarify also how ARM shows a noticeable improvement in dropped packets and links stability over DSR, even though there is more traffic and channel overhead in ARM.