Link Quality Driven Multipath Routing for Route Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks for Effective Communication

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) routing protocols are used to discover routes between a source-destination pair. The traditional routing protocols in MANETs discovery routes based on the shortest hop count metric due to which the routes selected for data transmission may be of low quality. A link on a selected route is low considered as low quality link if it requires more number of re-transmissions to transmit a data packet to next hop. This can be happen due to interference and contention on the link caused by nearby data sessions of high distance between the communication nodes which weakens the signal strength due to which the probability of frame error rate increases. Therefore, we require a routing protocol which uses a route discovery process which is based on other metrics than the shortest hop count to improve the communication process in wireless MANETs. In this thesis, we propose a multipath route discovery algorithm which considers the quality of an intermediate link as a metric for its inclusion in the possible routes selected between a source-destination pair. We can now use the secondary route without causing a new route discovery process due to this the network overhead caused by a route discovery process will be avoided. This increases the network communication performance greatly. The proposed LQMR routing protocol is implemented in the trail version of network simulator called EXata. The simulation results are taken on various network scenarios which are created with varying network loads and network mobility to check the effectiveness of our proposed method. Various performance metrics are used to evaluate the simulation results obtained such as end-to-end network delay, network routing overhead and packet delivery ratio. The performance metrics evaluation and analysis show that the proposed LQMR protocol greatly improves the performance of data transmission in MANETs while effectively handle the topology changes caused by the network mobility.