A Unicast Stable Path Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks based on the Inverse of Link Expiration Time

Abstract

The high-level contribution of this paper is the design and development of a unicast stable path routing protocol (referred to as SILET) that determines long-living routes based on the Inverse of the Link Expiration Times (LET) for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). From a graph theoretical perspective, we model SILET as a minimization problem to discover stable routes with the lowest value for the sum of the link weights; the weight of a link defined as 1 plus the inverse of the LETs. The inclusion of ‘1’ in the link weights helps to reduce the number of constituent links of the paths (i.e. the hop count). Performance comparison of SILET with FORP, DSR and ABR routing protocols in ns-2 illustrate that SILET discovers routes whose lifetimes are significantly longer compared to that of DSR and ABR and at most 20-40% lower than that of FORP; the hop counts of SILET routes are at most 4% larger than the minimum hop count; and the end-to-end delay per data packet for SILET routes is the lowest among all the routing protocols simulated – an indication that SILET effectively minimizes the stability-hop count tradeoff observed with the currently available MANET unicast routing protocols.