A stability-based distributed routing mechanism to support unicast and multicast routing in ad hoc wireless network

An ad hoc network can be envisioned as a collection of mobile routers. each equipped with a wireless transceiver, which are free to move about arbitrarily. In ad hoc wireless networks, even if two nodes are outside the wireless transmission range of each other, they may still be able to communicate in multiple hops using other intermediate nodes. However, the dynamics of these networks, as a consequence of mobility and disconnection of mobile hosts, pose a number of problems in designing routing schemes for effective communication between any pair of source and destination. In this paper, a stability-based unicast routing mechanism, that considers both link affinity and path stability in order to find out a stable route from source to destination. is proposed. It is then extended to support multicast routing as well where only local state information (at source) is utilized for constructing a multicast tree. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated on a simulated environment to show that the stability-based scheme provides a unified framework for both unicast and multicast routing and reduces the probability of route error drastically in both the cases. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.