A Minimum Interference Cross-Layer Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), channel contention and packet collision can seriously affect the performance of routing protocols, which will eventually affect the performance of the whole network. Besides, the arbitrary mobility of nodes makes contention and collision ever-changing and more complex. Thus, it is imperative to analyze the problem of contention and collision so as to build appropriate routes in MANETs. In this paper, by respectively predicting the durations of the contention and collision at every hop along the route, a minimum interference cross-layer routing protocol (MI-CLR) is proposed based on Random Waypoint (RWP) model. The new protocol classifies the interference in the network into two types; the first type of interference can only affect channel contention, while the other affects both channel contention and packet collision. Via taking the two types of interference together into account, we propose a new routing metric to build routes which guarantees that the established routes will not break frequently while having the minimum interference. Simulation results show that the MI-CLR protocol can significantly improve the network performance such as the average end-to-end delay, the packet loss ratio, the routing overhead and the throughput.