A Fault-Tolerant Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) consist of nodes and links that are vulnerable to frequent failures. In order to provide fault-tolerance in the network, it is important that the routing protocols take into consideration the redundancy in terms of multiple paths (ideally, disjoint) from the source to the destination nodes. Dynamic source routing (DSR) is a well-known protocol commonly applied to MANETs. In this paper, a new fault-tolerant routing protocol, that modifies the basic DSR protocol, is proposed. The proposed protocol tries to find two routing paths (if they exist) from the source to the destination node. During the route discovery process, the protocol identifies several new paths that are not able to be detected by the application of the basic DSR. The proposed protocol offers low overhead over the basic DSR, in terms of the number and sizes of control messages sizes. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol also achieves better packet delivery ratio as compared to DSR.