Routing and Quality of Service in Mobile AdHoc Networks with TORA/INORA

Dinesh Dharmaraju

Masters Dissertation, Number: CSHCN MS 2002-1, Year: 2002, Advisor: John S. Baras

Abstract

Mobile Adhoc NETworks(MANETs) are characterized by bandwidth constrainedlinks, multiple hops and dynamic topologies. Routing and providing qualityof service in these networks is a highly challenging task. In this thesis,we discuss the unicast routing in MANETs with enhancements to the Temporally OrderedRouting Algorithm(TORA) and quality of service at the network layer with INORA.

Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) is a highly distributed, scalable routingprotocol for MANETs. We discuss the improvements in the performance of TORA by QueryLocalization. We also discuss the improvements to TORA to remove aspecific traffic instability problem in TORA. We also describe theproactive operation of TORA and show by simulations that it is generally a good idea to have thegateway nodes in a MANET proactively perform route building and route maintenance.

We propose INORA, a network layer QoS support mechanism in adhoc networks, which makesuse of the INSIGNIA in-band signaling mechanism and TORA. We present aneffective couplingbetween TORA and INSIGNIA to get routes that are "best-able" to provide QoS requirementsfor a flow. INORA also provides congestion control. We present two schemes called"Coarse feedback scheme" and "Fine feedback scheme" under the INORA frame work. Weshow that under heavily loaded conditions, the INORA schemes perform better than whenthe signaling protocol and the routing protocol operate without feedback.