A performance simulation for route maintenance in wireless ad hoc networks

A routing protocol in ad hoc wireless networks must take special consideration to link failure and route maintenance in order that the network services will not be interrupted. To decrease the link failure, Anticipated Route Maintenance Protocol (ARM) has been proposed. However, the detailed performance for this protocol has not been evaluated. In this paper, we have compared the performance of two protocols, standard Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (DSR) and a combination of DSR and ARM. The simulation results show how ARM improves the functionality of DSR by preventing the links in the route from breaking. Packets delivery ratio could be increased using ARM maintenance and achieved approximately 100% improvement. The simulations clarify also how ARM shows a noticeable improvement in dropped packets and links stability over DSR, even though there is more traffic and channel overhead in ARM. Copyright 2004 ACM