Signal Strength Based MANET Routing Protocol: Cost Calculation and Performance Evaluation

Mobile Ad-Hoc NETworks (MANET) often require the use of routing protocols to dynamically discover and assign routes over multiple hops as the network's layout changes. There are many different criteria that can be used by a protocol to predict the loss of a connection, to calculate the quality of the route, and to intelligently decide routing paths. In this paper, we investigate the use of the signal strength between nodes as the criteria for dynamic routing in a MANET. The paper provides a method for the calculation of the cost of each route, an explanation of how the routing protocol is implemented, and the experimental results from evaluating the signal strength based protocol with various parameters along with a comparison to BATMAN, OLSR, and BABEL routing protocols.