RICA: A receiver-initiated approach for channel-adaptive on-demand routing in ad hoc mobile computing networks

To support truly peer-to-peer applications in ad hoc wireless mobile computing networks, a judicious and efficient ad hoc routing protocol is needed. Much research has been done on designing ad hoc routing protocols and some well known protocols are also being implemented in practical situations. However, one major drawback in existing state-of-the-art protocols, such as the AODV (ad hoc on demand distance vector) routing protocol, is that the time-varying nature of the wireless channels among the mobile terminals is ignored, let alone exploited. This can be a severe design shortcoming because the varying channel quality can lead to very poor overall route quality, in turn result in low data throughput. In this paper, by using a previously proposed adaptive channel coding and modulation scheme which allows a mobile terminal to dynamically adjust the data throughput via changing the amount of error protection incorporated, we devise a new receiver-initiated algorithm for ad hoc routing that dynamically changes the routes according to the channel conditions. Extensive simulation results indicate that our proposed protocol are more efficient in that shorter delays and higher rates are achieved.