Analytical model for optimizing periodic route maintenance in proactive routing for MANETs

Many applications, such as disaster response and military applications, call for proactive maintenance of links and routes in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) to ensure low latency during data delivery. The goal of this paper is to minimize the wastage of energy in the network due to high control traffic, which restricts the scalability and applicability of such protocols, without trading-off the low latency. We categorize the proactive protocols based on the periodic route and link maintenance operations performed; and analytically derive the optimum periods for these operations in different protocol classes. The analysis takes into account data traffic intensity, link dynamics, application reliability requirements, and the size of the network. The proposed optimization significantly reduces the control traffic for low data traffic intensity in the network and increases protocol scalability for large networks without compromising the low latency of proactive protocols.