DRP: An Efficient Directional Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper addresses the issue of routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) using directional antennas. Existing directional routing schemes either assume a complete network topology beforehand or simply use omni-directional routing schemes to forward packets in underlying directional environment. In this paper, we propose a Directional Routing Protocol (DRP) for MANETs. DRP is an on-demand directional routing protocol which assumes a cross layer interaction between routing and MAC layer and is inspired by Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The main features of DRP include an efficient route discovery mechanism, establishment and maintenance of directional routing and directional neighbor tables (DRT and DNT, respectively), and novel directional route recovery mechanisms. We have implemented DRP on top of MDA; a MAC protocol for directional antennas and have compared its performance with the DSR protocol over both omni-directional and directional antenna models. Our results show that DRP considerably improves the packet delivery ratio, decreases the end to end packet latency, has lesser routing overhead, and is robust to link failures.