Probabilistic proactive routing with active route trace-back for MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) is a very attractive networking technology for providing flexible communication in an anytime and anywhere fashion. However, MANET is infrastructure-less and highly dynamic, so the design of an efficient routing strategy for reliable end-to-end communication in such a network has been a challenging issue. The available routing protocols and their embedded information retrieval methods for MAMETs work well only for networks with certain limited assumptions of number of nodes, density of nodes and mobility. With the continuous expansion of the MANETs in real applications, it is now imperative to develop a new routing protocol for MAMETs that is more scalable and topology independent. In this paper, we introduce such a routing scheme for MANETs, which works well under a wide range of network topologies, nodes-density, coverage area size and nodes-mobility. The proposed scheme is based on a novel enhancement of the hint-based probabilistic protocol. Instead of broadcasting extensive control packets for network topology information retrieval as that of conventional routing schemes, the proposed scheme carefully reuses the feedback information carried in unicast packets for this purpose without introducing any extra overhead. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through both mathematical analysis and an extensive simulations study.