Fuzzy approach to improving route stability of the AODV routing protocol

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a group of autonomous mobile nodes that wirelessly communicate with each other to form a wireless dynamic topology network. It works without requiring any centralized pre-existing administration units (infrastructure less network). There are many studies that focus on improving source-destination route stability and lifetime by modifying the existing MANET routing protocols. In this paper, a fuzzy-based approach is proposed to enhance the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) reactive routing protocol’s performance by selecting the most trusted nodes to construct the route between the source and destination nodes. In this scheme, the nodes’ parameters, such as residual energy, node mobility, and number of hop counts, are fed through a fuzzy inference system to compute the value of the node trust level, which can be used as a metric to construct an optimal path from source to destination. The results of the simulation show that the proposed approach performs better than the traditional AODV routing protocol and minimum battery cost routing protocol in terms of average control overhead, packet delivery ratio, network throughput, and average end-to-end delay.