PSR: Proactive Source Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Innovative routing in mobile ad hoc networks is crucial for unleashing the full potential of such networks. In this paper, we propose a new Proactive Source Routing (PSR) protocol that has a very small communication overhead but provides nodes with more network structure information than distance-vector based protocols. The value of the source routing protocol includes: 1) better control of path selection by the source nodes for congestion avoidance, load and energy consumption balancing, and bypassing untrusted areas, 2) alleviation of IP forwarding at intermediate nodes, and 3) support for opportunistic data forwarding. PSR complements DSR as a proactive counterpart to provide responsive data transportation services in heavily loaded networks. Our simulation results show that PSR achieves performance similar to OLSR and DSDV, but with only a small fraction of the communication overhead.