The rapidly emerging wireless service requirements and deployment demands over last few decades necessitates the application of Mobile Ad hoc Networks in many areas. These application areas vary from social networks to safety-critical domains such as environmental monitoring, disaster rescue operations, military communications, etc. The potency of the ad hoc network deployment in a specific context is significantly affected by the underlying routing protocol. Hence, developing an efficient and secure routing protocol for MANETs is an important task in order to achieve the service level requirements and to satisfy the deployment demands effectively. However, development of such routing protocol is a challenging problem due to the inherent characteristics of ad hoc networks: frequent topology changes, open wireless medium, and limited resource constraints, etc. In addition, the stringent requirements: mobility, performance, security, trust and timing constraints, etc. add complexity to this problem. In this paper, we present an adaptive routing protocol for MANETs, which dynamically configures the routing function with respect to the metrics: (1) the varying requirement parameters and (2) the contextual features as per the desired application context. The requirement models include various performance, security, and functional parameters. On the other hand, the contextual features include mobility of nodes/groups of nodes, nodes’ trust values, resource constraints of nodes, geographical context, roles of individual nodes etc. Our routing protocol is evaluated with extensive simulation test cases and the efficacy of the protocol is reported.
