Link Failure Resilience in the Dynamic Source Routing Protocol

Reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks reduce the routing cost in high mobility environments where link failures are frequent.However, route discovery in these protocols is typically performed via network-wide flooding, which consumes a Substantial amount of bandwidthand causes a significant latency to data packets. To improve the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol and overcome these limitations, we proposetwo optimization techniques, viz. generalized salvaging mechanism and cache maintenance using a distributed topology discovery mechanismthrough mobile ant-agents. We show, by simulations, that our contributions improve the DSR performance, and particularly in large scale networks with high mobility and heavy load that cause frequent link failures.