A Distance-Aware Forwarding protocol for beaconless communication in mobile ad hoc networks and its performance

Recently, routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc NET-works (MANETs) which use position information to improve their efficiency have been actively studied. In this paper, we focus on Beacon-Less Routing algorithm (BLR) and propose a new forwarding algorithm that improves BLR and analyze its performance. BLR is efficient to reduce redundancy in its transmissions for flooding. When a node receives a packet, a time variable referred to as deferring time is calculated using the positions of the sender, the receiver, and the final destination of the packet. Each node forwards the packet after this deferring time unless it notices that another node forwards the same packet during the deferring time. As a result, only the node that is assigned the shortest deferring time forwards the packet. It is necessary to make this deferring time as short as possible in order to reduce the total deferring time in a multi-hop transmission. In order to evaluate our approach named Distance-Aware Forwarding (DAF), we carry out a performance analysis. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the total deferring time in a multi-hop transmission, although the number of hops slightly increases.