Routing Protocols in Wireless-Mobile

Ad Hoc Network - A Review

Liza Abdul Latiff I, Norsheila Fisal?

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universifi Teknologi Malaysia

Email: ' liia@mtmkl.utm.my,' sheila~suris.ee,utm,my

Abstract - This paper presents a review of current
routing protocols used in mobile ad hoc network
(MANET). Routing is a challenging issue in ad hoc
network since uodes are mobile and the topology of
the networks,is ever changing. Besides, all nodes
need to communicate via wireless infrastructure.
Routing metrics used such as shortest path, link
quality, power conservation and position location
(PL) will reduce route discovery time and also
message update cost.
I. Introduction
Mobile ad hoc network or MANET has evolved
since the 80s with the formation of the IETF (Internet
Engineering Task Force) MANET working group.
Subsequently, a.chaner was published in [I] with the
objective of developing a solution framework for
routing in ad hoc network.
An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile
devices that can dynamically move and can reorganize
themselves and communicate over wireless links.
These mobile devices are also autonomous nodes,
which serve as routers that forward packets onto the
next link. There is no centralized or central server that
organizes routing of these packets. Packets are
forwarded in a peer-to-peer mode via multihop path to
their respective destinations. Routing to the
destination is established at the nodes, which needs to
he determined before or after the reception of packets.
An ad hoc network consists of mobile platforms
known as nodes, 'which are free to move around
arbitrarily. These nodes, which are very small, may be
located in buildings, trucks, and cars or maybe on a
battlefield. Each node is equipped with a wireless
antenna that receives and transmits in an isotropic
manner, directed or steer able or a combination of all
three. Nodes are stand-alone devices and operate using
batteries. From a global point of view, an ad hoc
network is network with no infrastlucture, easily set
up in minimal time.
Due to the mobility of nodes in MANET,
topology of these networks change unpredictably and
routing in one of the main issues. Even though nodes
can self-organized themselves to form a network,
much research work has been done to come up with
the most suitable routing protocol for a certain
implementation..Efkicient routing of packets, methods
to conserve energy at nodes, mobility pattern of nodes
are some issues considered. Most of the work done by
researchers in research institutes and universities are
on the routing algonthm.
ILCharacteristics and Challenges
The characteristics and challenges of ad hoc and
sensor network can be divided into four main areas
such as:
i. Topology. Since nodes are free to move,
network topology of ad hoc network are
ever changing. Nodes are also routers
therefore, efficient routing protocol must be
considered so that packets reach their
destination in the shortest time and with no
errors.
ii. Bandwidth. Comparing wireless links to
wired infrastructure, usable bandwidth in ad
hoc network are much lower. This is due to
mulitpath fading, noise and interference
inherent in wireless transmission. Methods
to improve and increase the available
bandwidth needs to be considered.
iii. Power. Nodes in an ad hoc network rely on
battery for their source of energy. Energy
saving methods must he taken into account
to sustain stability and longetivity of nodes.
iv. Security. Ad hoc network are exposed to
eavesdroppings and spoofing. But because
of the decentralised nature . o f ad hoc
network, node failure is a localised to the
affected node only and minimal effect to the
whole network.
IILRoutiug and design objectives
Routing is a process of identifying a path from a
source to a destination before or after a request for
transmission. Routing protocol selected must be
reachable and loop free. If a node failure occurs, a
cache of backup routing will be required.
Routes chosen are the shortest path between
source and destination via fewer .intermediate nodes.
Computing of routes are decentralized and done at
every node and separated from the higher levels of
OS1 since network topology changes dynamically. To
reduce monitoring and updating overhead, route

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 computation must involve few, nodes only and not
nodes that have no traffic. Furthermore, few nodes
-
involvement means less energy usage or none at all at
other nodes.
Since ad hoc network are self-organized,
broadcasting to all nodes must be avoided because it
will create flooding at the nodes. Alternative routes
should also be identified to act as backup if a node
failure occurs.
One of the major challenges in designing a
routing protocol for ad hoc network is to determine a
trade off between information reachability and route
updating cost because network topology changes with
time as the node moves to a new location.
The various routing protocol proposed so far can
. be classified into two main broad categories: proactive
and reactive protocols. Proactive protocols are routing
algorithm that will periodically and continuously
update routes in the network so that when a packet
need totbe transmitted, routes to the destination are
already known and can he forwarded straight away.
Destination-Sequenced Distance ' Vector routing
(DSDV) [2], Wireless Routing Protocol (WRP) [IO]
are examples of proactive protocol. On the other hand,
reactive protocols are routing algorithms that will
initiate route computation only on demand. Examples
of these reactive protocols are ad hoc on-demand
distance vector (AODV) [4], Dynamic Source Routing
(DSR) [Y], temporally ordered routing algorithm
(TORA) 151, Signal Stability-based Routing (SSR)
[I21 and Associativity-Based Routing (ABR) [I I].
Proactive schemes posed a negligible delay since
route .discovery to destinations have to be done
periodically and before a request is made. On the
contrary, reactive protocols need time to determine
routes, which are not available at that time. Proactive
schemes, which have minimal delay, uses the whole
network capacity to update routes and in some cases
the routes determined may not he used at all!
neverth the less, in both schemes; a flood of route
. queries need to bepsent to all nodes and this leads to
message collisions and channel contention, This is
known as broadcast storm problem [ 6 ] . Due to this
long delay and requirement for traffic control, pure
reactive routing may he sufficient for real-time
. communication 131.
From these scenarios, what ad hoc network needs
is a hybrid protocol: a hybrid of proactive and reactive
scheme. Hybrid protocol initiates route discovery
procedure on-demand but at limited updating cost. An
example of this is the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP)
1
. proposed .by [7] and further improved as in 181.
Besides ZRP, we have Fisheye Sate Routing 1131,
Landmark Routing (LANMAR) [I41 and location-
i
aided routing (LAR) 1151 and Distance Routing Affect
Algorithm for Mobility (DREAM) [IY]. These
protocols use landmarks, location and distance of
''
nodes to reduce updating costs.
601
IV. Metrics used in current routing protocol
. .
The issue.of routing in mobile ad hoc network is
different from other wireless network and is very
. difficult due to mobility and no network infrastructure.
We are faced with two conflicting issues: one is to
optimize routes which means we need frequent
. topology updates and on the other hand, frequent
updates requires high message overhead.
The most common metric used to determine
optimal path is minimum number of hops or
intermediates nodes as in DSDV, AODV, DSR,
T O M , W R P Figure 1 shows how DSR is
implemented and the route selected is via node 2 and 7
for source 1 to destination 8, which has the minimum
number of hops.
Link quality is also a metric that is used.in SSR
and ABR. Routes are selected based on the signal
strength between nodes and stability of the connection.
This will ensure nodes chosen will he. less prone to
.. failure and hence a high probability of reaching
destination. .
I In ZRP, nodes updates are localized to a certain
zone radius only. Nodes will be updated proactively so
that transmission to neighboring nodes will he fast
where else nodes outside this zone will be updated on
need to hasis or on-demand.
. ' MO? "&
Fig. 1 DSR with minimum number of hops
: Node distance is also used as a metric that will
,affect the frequency of node updates as in DREAM.
Nodes update overhead is reduced because nodes will
send updates only when it moves from its original
location.
. Another type of metrics that is based of available
power is proposed by [24].and shows a reduction in
cost of routing packets via the shortest-hop routing by
5-30%. This new metric will ensure the mean time to
node failure is increased significantly with no increase
in packet delays.
The routing protocols mentioned above are based
on flat routing where nodes are on the same level and
maintains a routing table with enmes for all nodes and
hence for the whole network. This approach is suitable
for small networks and for scalable networks with
large number of nodes, a hierarchical style routing is
proposed as in FSR, LANMAR and LAR. Besides
hiorarchical routing, routing based on location
inlormation of nodes and direction of mobility from
the nodes' current location will assist in new route
computations .and hence reduce packet delay and
packet loss as in 1171, [16], and [18].
 Table 1 shows a compilation of various routing
schemes and their characteristics. From the table,
DSDV, AODV, TORA, DSR, which uses route
discovery and a flat routing, are best used in fewer
number of nodes so that broadcast problem will not
materialized. On the other hand, for large number of
nodes, a hierarchical network with node location
facility will reduceupdate costs as in ZRP, LANMAR,
and LAR.
A. Position Location (PL) in Wireless Network
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC)
have imposed a policy that wireless communication
licensees have to incorporate PL capability in their
systems in order to provide Enhanced-9 I1 (E-9 I I )
.service since October I , 2001. This regulation has
pushed researchers to incorporate this facility at the
nodes with or without Global Positioning System
(GPS).
Once a node location is known, the distance
between them can be derived and hence the number of
hops to the destination can he computed. Ultimately,
PL will provide reliable and accurate position of
mobile nodes..Most routing prptacols refer to GPS as
a global resource or reference. But this referencing to
GPS challenges the nature or characteristics of ad hoc
network. Therefore, navigation of radiolocation
techniques is used to locate nodes without using GPS
or if it is not available.
The two components of radiolocation are distance
measurements and triangulation. Distance or range
measurements are based on different physical
attributes such as: received signal strength (RSSI),
angle of arrival (AoA), time of arrival (TOA), and
time distance of arrival (TDOA).
In order to locate a node accurately with respect
to a reference or anchor nodes, 3D triangulation is
used. Anchor node with a priori knowledge of their
602
locations relative to a global coordinate system is used
in [20] based on RSSI where distance between
transmitter and receiver are determined by the
transmission power, received power and a good model
of the wireless ch+nel.,Triangulation is done by using
the least-mean squares (LMS) approach with a
substantial . accuracy from range measurements
obtained from a large number (>3) of neighboring
anchor nodes. From this, topology of the whole
network can be obtained hy topology,discovery where
using Assumption Based Coordinates (ABC) even
though with low accuracy. [20] also proposed global
positioning by engaging in cooperative ranging
approach. Even though convergence to global
positioning is time consuming and node .with high
mobility may be hard to locate, it is sufficient to be
used in sensor network, which have low mobility, and
long time discovery is acceptable.
[22] and [23] have done research on angle of
arrival (AoA) to locate nodes and proposed Ad Hoc
Positioning System (APS). AoA is a method to
estimate the direction from which a neighbor is
sending data. AoA can be implemented either as an
antenna array, or as a combination of radio and
ultrasound receivers. APS is a hybrid of distance
vector and beacon based positioning are usable for
navigational or tracking purposes only.
[21] made ay analysis of time-based position
location algorithm such as direct solution, iterative
least squares, Taylors series and Chans algorithm.
An algorithm using the decision feedback (DF)
method is proposed to improve the accuracy of the
previous calculated result. The metrics used are
position location error, standard deviation and the
number of divergence and shows to be more superior
that not using DF method.
[17] proposed an algorithm to provide a seamless
connection service by reacting before connectivity
breaks. GPS position information is used to estimate
expirationtime of the link between two adjacent
mobiles because nodes exhibit, some degree of
regularity in the mobility pattern. For example, a car
travelling on a mad is likely to follow the path of the
road and a tank travelling across a battlefield is likely
to maintain its heading and speed for some time before
it changes them. The paper shows application of
mobility pattern to unicast protocol and to multicast
protocols. Simulation was done using Global Mobile
Simulation (GloMoSim) library, which is based on
Parsec (parallel discrete-event simulation capability)
with 50 nodes placed randomly in 1000 m X 1000 m
area. The metrics used are packet delivery ratio,
number of control bytes transmitted per data byte
delivered and number of total packets transmitted per
data packet delivered. Simulation results indicate that
mobility prediction does improved packet delivery to
destinations and control packets are utilized more
efficiently. Mobility prediction is utilized to choose
routes with high connectivity.
 B. Energy Eficient Routing
. .
Another area of research is energy conservation
at the nodes since nodes in ad hoc network are
- standalone and depends on battery for their source of
energy. Nodes consume a lot of energy in route
computation and packet transmission Bnd multi-hop
routing protocols. These networks must be designed
with a focus on energy efficiency.
Clustering of nodes and transmitting aggregated
data from nodes having similar attributes by a cluster
head is the approach proposed by [27] and named
Data Combining Entities (DCE). Expected results
were seen inreduction in energy consumption by a
factor 2 to 3. Also a more uniform resource utilization
can be obtained by shaping traffic flow using
stochastic scheme, energy-based scheme F d stream-
based scheme. [29] proposed a distributed,
randomized clustering algorithm to organize sensors
nodes into hierarchy of cluster heads and observe
energy saving increases with the number of levels.
[30] addresses the optimal fixed packet size for
- data communication in energy constrained wireless
sensor network. Optimal packet size is determined for
a set of radio and channel parameters by maximizing
energy efficiency metric. Results show that some type
of forward error correction techniques needs to he
determined to improve energy efficiency even though
it need additional parity bits. Binary BCH codes are
found to be 15 % more energy efficient than the best
- convolutional codes.
[26] also proposed energy saving algorithm that
is based on constrained shortest-path algorithm. A
simulation to study the effect of maximum
transmission distance constraint and comparisons with
two other algorithms ere done. To conserve energy,
bopwith the moderate distance uses less energy
compared to hop with a huge distances.
..
On the other hand, further work .done by [25]
which proposed that it might not be optimal in view of
network lifetime ind long-term comectivity to use the
lowest energy path. A new. scheme called energy
aware routing that uses sub-optimal path occasionally
will increase network lifetimes of up to 40% over
comparable schemeslike directed diffusion routing
proposed by [28].
V. Conclusions . .
. .
Mobile ad hoc network consists of, a large
number of nodes that moves arbitrarily and operates
on batteries. In order to reduceroute discovery time
and energy usage in mobile ad hoc network, a network
should he hierarchical a n d incorporate PL of nodes.
Besides these factors, link quality, backup routes and
mobiliQ prediction of nodes will also help to reduce
. routing sfrafegiesfor ad hoc wireless networks,
probability of link failure but increase in destination
reachability.
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