A mobility aware protocol synthesis for efficient routing in ad hoc mobile networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the mobility of the nodes is a complicating factor that significantly affects the effectiveness and performance of the routing protocols. Our work builds upon recent results on the effect of node mobility on the performance of available routing strategies (i.e., path-based, using support) and proposes a protocol framework that exploits the usually different mobility rates of the nodes by adapting the routing strategy during execution. We introduce a metric for the relative mobility of the nodes, according to which the nodes are classified into mobility classes. These mobility classes determine, for any pair of origin and destination, the routing technique that best corresponds to their mobility properties. Moreover, special care is taken for nodes remaining almost stationary or moving with high (relative) speeds. Our key design goal is to limit the necessary implementation changes required to incorporate existing routing protocols into our framework. We provide extensive evaluation of the proposed framework, using a well-known simulator (NS2). Our first findings demonstrate that the proposed framework improves, in certain cases, the performance of existing routing protocols. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.