Route information piggybacking in multihop wireless networks

Loop-free routing is one of the most desirable qualities for multihop wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a new loop-free mechanism, Route Information Piggybacking (RIP), which emphasizes the utilization of data packets to facilitate route maintenance and loop detection. RIP is a lightweight mechanism and it can be easily integrated into any on-demand distance-vector routing protocol. We have applied RIP to a native but flawed on-demand distance-vector routing algorithm in mobile ad hoc networks, and we call the new routing protocol Simple Mobile Ad hoc RouTing (SMART). Extensive simulation results reveal that SMART achieves loop-freedom effectively, and it outperforms AODV significantly in terms of scalability, routing overhead and delivery ratio.