Channel quality based routing protocol (CQBR) and realization on MANET platform

Abstract

The key factors for a routing protocol in Ad Hoc networks include route discovery, route maintenance and route destroy. Our laboratory has done a lot of researches based on our Ad Hoc hardware platform applying the classical AODV protocol. We found out that an essential cause for unsuccessful route discovery, instable route or even the limitation of hop numbers can be summarized as the bad channel quality for the established route. We propose a mechanism of wireless channel quality based routing protocol (CQBR). That is during the route discovery process, the RSSI is introduced to value the wireless hop quality and only those hops with certain signal strength can be choose for the construction of a route. We have realized the CQBR on our platform, including the RSSI generation on the physical layer and the RREQ process on the network layer. The practical test results demonstrate that CQBR has a great improvement in the aspects of more reasonable route, higher throughput, and lower packet loss.