WALS-DA: A Refined Label Switching Framework for Directional- and Hybrid-Antennas MANETs

The original Wireless Arithmetic Label Switching (WALS) framework is unsuitable for MANETs with directional antennas. To overcome this, we propose WALS-DA (WALS with Directional Antennas) which dynamically assigns prime keys to edges (virtual links) between antennas instead of preassigning them to nodes. Unlike WALS’s node-keys, WALS-DA uses edge-keys, allowing intermediate nodes to identify next-hop neighbors via modulo operations on directional links. We also support hybrid (omni-directional + directional) setups for backward compatibility. While WALS-DA has slightly higher label overhead, it remains viable for specialized MANETs, with open issues noted for future work.