Route recovery mechanisms for ad hoc networks equipped with switched single beam antennas

In this paper we propose a novel three phase route recovery mechanism for routing over switched single beam directional antennas. We enhance the popular dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol to the underlying directional layer and include an improved broadcast mechanism to facilitate an efficient route discovery. In the event of a link failure, our optimized directional routing protocol (DRP) proceeds in three phases to recover the route to the destination: (i) antenna beam handoff (ii) local route recovery and (iii) zonal route recovery. We have compared the performance of DRP with the DSR protocol over both omnidirectional and directional antenna models in conditions of varying network mobility. Our results clearly indicate that DRP is robust to link failures even in highly mobile scenarios.