Channel Contention-Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

With the development of wireless technology, two basic wireless network models that are commonly used, known as infrastructure and wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs), have been developed. In the literature, it has been observed that channel contention is one of the main reasons for packet drop in WANETs. To handle this problem, this paper presents a routing protocol named CCBR (Channel Contention Based Routing). CCBR tries to determine a least contended path between the endpoints to increase packet delivery ratio and to reduce packet delay and normalized routing overhead. Moreover, throughout the active data section, each intermediate node computes its channel contention value. If an intermediate node detects an increase in channel contention, it notifies the source node. Then the source node determines another least contended route for transmission. The advantages of CCBR are verified in our NS2-based performance study, and the results show that CCBR outperforms ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and routing overhead by 4% to 9%.