Abstract:Routing quality is affected by several factors altogether in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). Most of current MANET routing protocols utilize hop count or other metric as their route creation criteria, which makes it hard to improve the overall protocol performance. This paper proposes an integrated routing metric which takes energy, communication interference, drop rate and mobility of a node (EIDM) into consideration. With an adaptive weight, this metric can adjust its stress on different items according to the network condition. Simulation results show that the EIDM does well in mitigating the hotspot effect.