Abstract
Current efforts for providing an efficient dynamic source routing protocol (DSR) for use in multi-hop ad-hoc wireless are promising. This is since DSR has a unique characteristic in that it uses source routing, instead of relying on the routing table at each intermediate device. This study addresses the current challenges facing DSR protocol in terms of the dynamic changes of the route and how to update such changes into the route cache of the DSR. The challenges typically persist when a sudden route break occurs resulting in a delay in updating the new node location into the cache of the DSR protocol. For that, this study proposes a novel algorithm to improve the cache updating of DSR protocol in the ad-hoc network using dominating set-based routing (DBR). In DBR, the dominating nodes establish node update cache in accordance with the characteristics of the new route. Network Simulator version 2 (NS2) was used to implement and evaluate the proposed algorithm. A comparison of certain performance metrics was carried among the proposed DSR-DBR, DSR-route-cache, and DSR-original in the transmission control protocol and user datagram protocol. The DSR-DBR performance result showed a significant improvement in the average throughput, average end-to-end delay, average discovery time and routing overhead.