Link Stability Based Approach for Route Discovery in MANET Using DSR

Background: Mobile Ad-hoc network is a set of devices which are capable of communicating with each other without the help of any central entity or fixed infrastructure. The absence of fixed access points makes MANET flexible and deployable at the extreme geographical territories. Each device has routing capabilities to facilitate communication among nodes in the network. Objectives: 1) To selects the stable path which has lowest hop count. 2) To use backup path in case of link break up to minimize delay incurred in finding out the alternate path. Methods: Dynamic source routing is modified to choose the most stable path and a backup path is cached to save the route discovery time in case of link failure. Results: The modified-DSR based on Link stability and hop count is performing better as compared to DSR most of the time. Conclusion: A modified-DSR is proposed that selects the path using hop count and link stability as parameters. The advantage of modified-DSR is that if a link breaks in between data communication then back up path can be used for carrying out the data transfer. Analysis is done by varying the node density and counting number of packets received .Modified-DSR gives better results for light to moderate network and DSR performs better if the number of nodes increases beyond a certain limit.