Enhanced QLRS-APM: A New Proposal for Enhancing Local Route Repair in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Change in topology is very common in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) due to the frequent and unpredictable movement or depletion of energy of the battery powered nodes in the network. As a result, routes made up of multiple hops in MANET breaks very often mainly following the failure of one or more adjacent nodes. Considerable research has been conducted on handling link failure locally in ad hoc networks. Existing local route repair schemes such as Localized Route Repair (LRR) [1], AODV-BR [2] and Witness-Aided Routing (WAR) [3] try to repair route breakage locally but all suffer from inefficient route repair algorithms resulting in long delay in reestablishing new path and more specifically excessive energy consumption due to mandatory requirement for the nodes in the network to operate in promiscuous mode. All these problems were well addressed by a scheme called Quick Local Repair Scheme (QLRS-APM) that used Adaptive Promiscuous Mode [4]. QLRS-APM is a novel approach for local route repair but still consumes considerably good amount of energy which can be tuned further. Also, this approach generates excessive load in the network by blindly initiating broadcast messages during local route repair process which can be bypassed. This paper focuses on these and other problems existing in QLRS-APM and gives new proposals to enhance QLRS-APM by limiting promiscuous mode operation and eliminating the need for broadcast during local route repair.