MQ-Routing: Mobility-, GPS- and energy-aware routing protocol in MANETs for disaster relief scenarios

Mobile-Ad-Hoc-Networks (MANETs) are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes, which communicate through wireless links. The main issues in MANETs include the mobility of the network nodes, the scarcity of computational, bandwidth and energy resources. Thus, MANET routing protocols should explicitly consider network changes and node changes into the algorithm design. MANETs are particularly suited to guarantee connectivity in disaster relief scenarios, which are often impaired by the absence of network infrastructures. Moreover, such scenarios entail strict requirements on the lifetime of the device batteries and on the reactivity to possibly frequent link failures. This work proposes a proactive routing protocol, named MQ-Routing, aimed at maximizing the minimum node lifetime and at rapidly adapting to network topology changes. The proposed protocol modifies the Q-Routing algorithm, developed via Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, by introducing: (i) new metrics, which account for the paths availability and the energy in the path nodes, and which are dynamically combined and adapted to the changing network topologies and resources; (ii) a fully proactive approach to assure the protocol usage and reactivity in mobile scenarios. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol, through comparisons with both the standard Q-Routing and the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocols. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.