Improving proactive routing with a multicriteria and adaptive framework in ad-hoc wireless networks

Ad hoc wireless networks have aroused much interest of the scientific community in the last two decades. The provision of Quality of Service (QoS) is a prominent challenge in this research field, since these networks are prone to suffer from instabilities related to wireless medium and mobility. Depending on application, the protocol needs to consider two or more QoS criteria when solving the routing problem. In this context, this work proposes a multicriteria and adaptive framework for proactive routing in order to generate promising compromise solutions by considering critical network quality indicators. Two new methods are proposed—one based on weighted sum method and another based on compromise method ($$\varepsilon$$-constraint)—and compared with the standard weighted sum method. Aiming to map a single final solution, a utility function is proposed to support the definition of the parameters (weights and constraints) of each method. The results show the framework, jointly with the proposed methods, were efficient in promoting significant improvements in the quality indicators investigated in static and mobile scenarios.