TAF: A Temporal Adaptation Framework for Hybrid Routing in Mobile AdHoc Networks

Abstract

A central challenge in ad hoc networks is the design of routing protocols that can adapt their behavior to frequent and rapid changes at the network level. Choosing between reactive, proactive, or hybrid routing regimes and selecting appropriate configuration parameters for a chosen protocol are difficult tasks. This paper introduces a framework, called TAF, for seamlessly adapting between proactive and reactive routing protocols. This general framework enables a proactive and reactive protocol to coexist on the same network, provides a low-overhead mechanism by which these two routing strategies can be combined at fine grain and proposes an analytical model for automatically adjusting protocol parameters. Combined, this mechanism and model enable a protocol within our framework to find a near-optimal mix of proactive and reactive routing strategies for the mobility rate and traffic patterns observed on the network. We examine the application of this temporal adaptation framework to the construction of three specialized ad hoc rout- ing protocols. These protocols minimize packet overhead, achieve a targeted loss rate, and minimize routing latency using the TAF framework. In all three cases, hybrid protocols based on the TAF framework perform as well as or better than a proactive (TORA) and a reactive (AODV) protocol.