Cost adaptive mechanism to provide network diversity for MANET reactive routing protocols

We develop a cost adaptive mechanism (CAM) that can be used with any MANET (mobile ad hoc network) reactive routing protocol employing a route discovery mechanism. Through CAM, various link cost metrics are gathered, including transmission power required on a link, remaining battery life, and traffic load of each node. A route selection time window is introduced to allow the destination node and the source node to select among viable routes according to current network needs, thereby providing a level of network diversity. We evaluate the performance of CAM and present our preliminary results.