DA-MLAR-ODTP: Directional Antenna Multipath Location Aided Routing with On Demand Transmission Power

This paper studies a directional antenna multi-path location aided routing (DA-MLAR) scheme with on demand transmission power support. The targeted application contexts include communications in space networks, where efficient and reliable packet delivery is very challenging due to the high bit error rate, intermittent connectivity, limited bandwidth and energy. This research enhances our DA-MLAR protocol with on demand transmission power (ODTP) capability. By using different transmission power based on the calculated distance from the current sender node to the destination node or the next hop node, DA-MLAR-ODTP gets the best of the directional and omni-directional modes. Compared to DA-MLAR, on demand transmission power mode further improves the packet delivery ratio by up to 37% and dwindles end-to-end delay by up to 57% with more or less the same amount of energy consumption. Simulation experiments show that this is a promising technique for more reliable communications in MANET with energy and other constraints