Abstract
The contribution of this paper is two fold. It first analyses the flooding strategies for the Wireless Multihop Networks (WMNs) then it enhances the reactive and proactive routing protocols. For analysis purpose, we select four widely used flooding techniques for routing: i. traditional flooding, ii. Time-To-Live based Expanding Ring Search (TTL-based ERS) flooding scheme, iii. TTL-based Scope Routing (SR) flooding and iv. Multi-Point Relays (MPR) flooding. These techniques play a vital role and act as a backbone for routing protocols. Therefore, we compare efficiency of these techniques for six widely used routing protocols: Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), DYnamic MANET On-demand (DYMO), Fish-eye Scope Routing (FSR) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR). DSDV uses traditional flooding, AODV, DSR and DYMO use TTL-based ERS flooding, FSR uses TTL-based SR flooding and OLSR uses MPR flooding. This paper also presents mathematical models for flooding techniques and studies the affects of these techniques on their respective protocols in terms of energy and time consumption. This is done to measure the cost incurred by the routing protocols in the form of routing overhead and latencies. A novel contribution of this work is the enhancement in search set values and intervals of routing algorithms to improve the efficiency of selected existing protocols. A detailed comparison analysis of selected protocols with their default and enhanced routing algorithms in NS-2 is also a part of this work.