An Approach Towards Stable and Secure Routing Strategy in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract

An ad hoc network is wireless network, where nodes are moving freely without having any stable infrastructure. Such networks are built for serving some specific purpose and also specific time duration only. As there is no any stable infrastructure, nodes can roam anywhere in the network the topology of such networks may change dynamically. As every node are not within the range of each other so instead of direct transmission, data packets from originator node to final destination node are transmitted through intermediate nodes as multi-hop routing within a store and forward manner. Nodes are mobile and having limited amount of battery. As dynamic topology, lack of infrastructure and limited amount of battery at each node, effective routing is a very crucial task in such networks. Lots of traditional routing protocols are available for ad hoc wireless networks. But majority of them are able to find shortest path between pair of nodes, which want to communicate with each other. As such protocols are not considered some of the crucial parameters into their account like energy level, location of nodes, reliability of nodes etc. so it will get poor performance with respect to packet delivery ratio, life time of node/route, security of route etc. In last decade, lots of strategies have been found for ad hoc wireless networks for selecting stable route but the definition of stability may vary in each routing protocol. For this research, DSR is considered as a base routing protocol. DSR is source-initiated routing protocol, as for finding path between originator and targeted DSR broadcasts route request packets in the network which are received by all the neighbors of source. Neighboring nodes also known as intermediate node again rebroadcast the same request packets towards destination node. Each node has forward route request only once. After it arrived at destination, destination node will take hop count and responds with route reply packets to the source.