Node Fragility versus Link Fragility for Route Selection in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad-hoc network is a dynamically changing network of mobile devices that communicate without the support of a fixed structure. There is a direct communication among the neighboring devices, but non-neighboring devices requires a robust and intelligent routing strategy to ensure reliable and efficient communication. The performance of routing protocols depends on the quality of the routes chosen in terms of route longevity. A protocol that discovers better routes also features a reduced rate of route failures and lesser route discovery traffic. Thus an important aspect of the decision process is to compare and pick the more stable route. A Route Fragility Coefficient (RFC) metric was used to estimate routes' stability. In this paper, the link fragility metric is used to create a new metric called Node Fragility Coefficient (NFC) that is also used to estimate routes' stability. Comparing routing protocols using RFC and NFC metrics to select the more stable routes, simulation results prove that using NFC is much better, it leads to better throughput, average packet's delay, average number of hops/ packet, average consumed power/ packet, percentage number of route changes and percentage number of undelivered packets.