Backup path set selection in ad hoc wireless network using link expiration time

Topological changes in mobile ad hoc networks frequently render routing paths unusable. Such recurrent path failures have detrimental effects on quality of service. A suitable technique for eliminating this problem is to use multiple backup paths between the source and the destination in the network. Most of the proposed on-demand routing protocols however, build and rely on single route for each data session. Whenever there is a link disconnection on the active route, the routing protocol must perform a path recovery process. This paper proposes an effective and efficient protocol for backup and disjoint path set in an ad hoc wireless network. This protocol converges into a highly reliable path set very fast with no message exchange overhead. The paths selection according to this algorithm is beneficial for mobile ad hoc networks, since it produces a set of backup paths with much higher reliability. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our algorithm in terms of route numbers in the path set and its reliability. In order to acquire link reliability estimates, we use link expiration time (LET) between each two nodes.In another experiment, we save the LET of entire links in the ad hoc network during a specific time period, then use them as a data base for predicting the probability of proper operation of links.Links reliability obtains from LET. Prediction is done by using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network which is trained with error back-propagation error algorithm. Experimental results show that the MLP net can be a good choice to predict the reliability of the links between the mobile nodes with more accuracy.