Overhead Reduction for Route Repair in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), routing overhead is a major problem since a bandwidth and an energy of mobile node are limited. Due to node’s mobility and an unreliable wireless link, a path connecting between a source and a destination will break frequently. This causes a network-wide flooding of routing packets being invoked repeatedly, leading to high packet loss and network congestion, especially in a high mobility network. In this paper, we propose an efficient route repair method based on Query Localization technique. The routing packets, which propagate back to a source, are discarded to alleviate unnecessary rebroadcasting. Simulation results show that our proposed method can reduce routing overhead and MAC collision rate without sacrificing packet delivery ratio compared to existing protocols.