PSR: A Lightweight Proactive Source Routing Protocol For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Opportunistic data forwarding has drawn much attention in the research community of multihop wireless networking, with most research conducted for stationary wireless networks. One of the reasons why opportunistic data forwarding has not been widely utilized in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is the lack of an efficient lightweight proactive routing scheme with strong source routing capability. In this paper, we propose a lightweight proactive source routing (PSR) protocol. PSR can maintain more network topology information than distance vector (DV) routing to facilitate source routing, although it has much smaller overhead than traditional DV-based protocols [e.g., destination-sequenced DV (DSDV)], link state (LS)-based routing [e.g., optimized link state routing (OLSR)], and reactive source routing [e.g., dynamic source routing (DSR)]. Our tests using computer simulation in Network Simulator 2 (ns-2) indicate that the overhead in PSR is only a fraction of the overhead of these baseline protocols, and PSR yields similar or better data transportation performance than these baseline protocols.