Modeling and Evaluation of Adaptive Ad Hoc Routing in Wireless Networks

The hosts in Wireless Ad hoc Networks (WANETs) are often facing dynamic environments. The changes can be caused by either the network environment parameters, or the application characteristics. This wide variety of changeable parameters raises great challenges to routing in WANETs. According to the way that the routes are initiated, the routing algorithms in WANETs can be classified as proactive routing, reactive routing, and hybrid routing. But all the three types of routing are imperfect, and they are not capable to adapt themselves to the dynamic environments. Therefore, a new adaptive routing scheme is introduced. A study of the existing adaptive routing algorithms in WANETs shows that their adaptivity has been considered and implemented in a limited scope. In this dissertation, a novel approach of adaptive routing is proposed and implemented to explore the possibility of introducing more degrees of freedom to the adaptivity in WANETs routing. The proposal aims to enable any host in the network to decide when to apply which routing algorithm to which neighbor. The adaption of the routing algorithm can be applied either to a subset of the hosts, or several subsets of the hosts, or the entire network. The flexibility of selecting the set of hosts, of which the routing algorithm in use will be altered, is the highlight of this newly proposed adaptive routing algorithm.