Using directionality in mobile routing

The increased usage of directional methods of communications has prompted research into leveraging directionality in every layer of the network stack. In this paper, we explore the use of directionality in layer 3 to facilitate routing in highly mobile environments. We introduce mobile orthogonal rendezvous routing protocol (MORRP), a lightweight, but scalable routing protocol utilizing directional communications (such as directional antennas or free-space-optical transceivers) to relax information requirements such as coordinate space embedding, node localization, and mobility. This relaxation is done by introducing a novel concept called the directional routing table (DRT) which maps a set-of-IDs to each directional interface to provide probabilistic routing information based on interface direction. We show that MORRP achieves connectivity with high probability even in highly mobile environments while maintaining only probabilistic information about destinations. We also compare MORRP with various proactive, reactive, and position-based routing protocols using single omni-directional interfaces and 8 directional interfaces and show that MORRP gains over 10-14X additional goodput vs. traditional protocols and 15-20% additional goodput vs. traditional protocols using multiple interfaces.