A Novel Proactive Routing Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are self-configuring networks of nodes connected via wireless without the use of any existing network infrastructure. In MANETs, each node acts both as a host and as a router, thus it must be capable of forwarding data packets to other nodes. Due to the mobility of nodes, topologies of these networks change frequently. In order to solve these problems, a functional and efficient unicast routing protocol is needed. Many different unicast routing protocols have been developed for MANETs. They can be classified into three main categories: proactive, reactive and hybrid. By studying advantages and disadvantages of each one, a new routing protocol is proposed. The new scheme called OLSRBF is proactive routing protocol mostly based on the existing OLSR routing protocol. Modification introduced to the new routing protocol is based primarily on the use of Bellman-Ford algorithm for determining the shortest distance between nodes within a MANET network. In order to validate the design and performance of the new routing protocol it is qualitatively compared with existing AODV, DSDV and OLSR routing protocols. The final evaluation is presented at the end of this paper.