IWDRP: An Intelligent Water Drops Inspired Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper deals with the problem of routing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of mobile devices deployed without any pre-established infrastructure or centralized administration. Routing is a very challenging issue since the appearance of this technology. The main goal of every routing protocol is to find a route between two communicating nodes while optimizing overall performances of the network. This paper introduces a novel routing protocol inspired from the nature and that should deal with the dynamic aspect of MANET. The used approach, called Intelligent Water Drops (IWD), mimics the processes that happen in the natural river systems, particularly, the actions that water drops perform in the rivers to find the shortest path to their destination (sea). In fact, it is observed that water drops of a river often find good paths among lots of possible paths in their ways from a source to a destination. We combined these ideas with a route failure prediction mechanism to develop a new routing protocol for MANETs called IWDRP. This prediction method is based on the received signal strength indicator. Further simulation results show that IWDRP is able to achieve better results in terms of packet delivery, end-to-end delay in comparison with AODV-BFABL. The achievement in this paper has certain reference value to the further study of the routing issue in MANETs.