DOA: DSR over AODV Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We present a lightweight hierarchical routing model, Way Point Routing (WPR), in which a number of intermediate nodes on a route are selected as waypoints and the route is divided into segments by the waypoints. Waypoints, including the source and the destination, run a high-level intersegment routing protocol, while the nodes on each segment run a low-level intrasegment routing protocol. One distinct advantage of our model is that when a node on the route moves out or fails, instead of discarding the whole original route and discovering a new route from the source to the destination, only the two waypoint nodes of the broken segment have to find a new segment. In addition, our model is lightweight because it maintains a hierarchy only for nodes on active routes. On the other hand, existing hierarchical routing protocols such as CGSR and ZRP maintain hierarchies for the entire network. We present an instantiation of WPR, where we use DSR as the intersegment routing protocol and AODV as the intrasegment routing protocol. This instantiation is termed DSR over AODV (DOA) routing protocol. Thus, DSR and AODV—two well-known on-demand routing protocols for MANETs—are combined into one hierarchical routing protocol and become two special cases of our protocol. Furthermore, we present two novel techniques for DOA: one is an efficient loop detection method and the other is a multitarget route discovery. Simulation results show that DOA scales well for large networks with more than 1,000 nodes, incurring about 60 percent-80 percent less overhead than AODV, while other metrics are better than or comparable to AODV and DSR.