Location Prediction Based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a new mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocol called "Location Prediction Based Routing" (LPBR) to simultaneously minimize the number of route discoveries and hop count of the paths for a source-destination session. During a regular flooding-based route discovery, LPBR collects the location and mobility information of nodes in the network and stores the collected information at the destination node of the route search process. When the minimum-hop route discovered through the flooding-based route discovery fails, the destination node attempts to predict the current location of each node using the location and mobility information collected during the latest flooding-based route discovery. A minimum hop Dijkstra algorithm is run on the locally predicted global topology. If the predicted minimum hop route exists in reality, no expensive flooding-based route discovery is needed and the source continues to send data packets on the discovered route; otherwise, the source initiates another flooding-based route discovery. Our ns-2 simulations indicate that LPBR incurs a significantly reduced number of flooding-based route discovery attempts compared with the minimum-hop based and stable path routing protocols. At the same time, the average hop count per path is close to that of the minimum-hop based routing protocols.

I. Introduction

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic distributed system of wireless nodes that move independently of each other. MANET routing protocols are either proactive or reactive in nature. Proactive routing protocols determine and maintain routes between any pair of nodes irrespective of their requirement. The reactive on-demand routing protocols determine a route only when required. As the network topology changes dynamically, reactive routing has been preferred over proactive routing [1]. We will focus only on the reactive on-demand routing protocols in this paper.