Journals Proceedings

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a wireless network that does not rely on any fixed infrastructure (i.e., routing facilities, such as wired networks and access points), and whose nodes must coordinate among themselves to determine connectivity and routing. This paper addresses the process of designing a routing protocol for an ad-hoc network. There have been many proposed algorithms that solve the routing problem in a mobile ad-hoc network. It is a difficult task to compare the performance of these protocols qualitatively as there are many parameters that affect network performance. Various simulation packages for networks of this type exist. One such package is the Network Simulator. It is a discrete time event simulator that can be used to model wired and wireless networks. This paper presents the simulations results that compare recently proposed routing algorithms. From this comparison study it is shown that on-demand algorithms perform best in a mobile ad-hoc environment and also describes the design of a novel on-demand routing algorithm. The on-demand algorithms proposed thus far use a blind flooding technique during the route discovery process. This method is inefficient and creates excessive routing overhead. The routing protocol proposed in the work implements a query localization technique that significantly reduces the network traffic. Our simulation results show that such a scheme makes the on-demand routing algorithm more efficient and scalable than existing ones.