Intelligent Routing and Flow Control In MANETs

Abstract

Improving the performance of the Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) is a challenge. MANETs present several constraints such as dynamic topology, wireless link communication and limited resources like bandwidth and energy. Routing without taking into account these constraints degrades performance and aggravates congestion problem. This paper proposes a new solution combining QoS (Quality of Service) routing protocol and flow control mechanism. This QoS routing protocol selects the routes with more resources in an intelligent manner rather than diffusion. It returns the best route offering a higher transmission rate, a less delay and a more stability. This protocol uses a new metric to compute the most stable route. To reinforce the congestion avoidance, we add a flow control mechanism to adjust the sender's transmission rate for each route. The solution is modeled by the ant systems. The results obtained under the Network Simulator (NS2.31) show that our QoS routing protocol improves the network performance compared to QoS-AODV protocol. The addition of flow control mechanism produces significant improvements in network system performance.