Varying the route caching scheme can significantly
change network performance for on-demand routing protocols
in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Initial
route caching schemes retain paths or links until they are
shown to be broken. However, stale routing information
can degrade network performance with latency and extra
routing overhead. Therefore, more recent caching schemes
delete links at some fixed time after they enter the cache.
This paper proposes using either the expected path duration
or the link residual time as the link cache timeout.
These mobility metrics are theoretically calculated for an
appropriate random mobility model. Simulation results in
NS2 show that both of the proposed link caching schemes
can improve network performance in the dynamic source
routing protocol (DSR) by reducing dropped data packets,
latency and routing overhead, with the link residual time
scheme out-performing the path duration scheme.IEEE, South Australian Sectio