A location prediction based routing protocol and its extensions for multicast and multi-path routing in mobile ad hoc networks

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 (Broch et. al., 1998). We will focus only on the reactive on-demand routing protocols in this chapter. Based on route selection principles, MANET routing protocols can be classified as minimum-weight based and stability-based (Meghanathan, 2009d). Most of the minimumweight based protocols aim to minimize the number of hops in a path. Some of the wellknown minimum-hop based routing protocols are the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol (Johnson et. al., 2000), Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol (Perkins & Royer, 1999) and the Location-Aided Routing (LAR) protocol (Ko & Vaidya, 2000). Stability-based protocols aim for routes with longer lifetimes in order to reduce the number of route discoveries. The Flow Oriented Routing Protocol, FORP, (Su et. al., 2001) yields the sequence of most stable routes among the stable path routing protocols available in the literature (Meghanathan, 2008). Performance comparison studies reveal that the stable path protocols could incur as low as half the number of route discoveries incurred by the minimum-hop based protocols, but the average hop count of stable paths could be as large as twice the minimum hop count (Meghanathan, 2008). Frequent flooding-based route discoveries incurred by the minimum-hop based protocols significantly consume network bandwidth and congest the network. Stable paths with larger hop count also consume more network bandwidth and reduce frequency reuse. Moreover, nodes that are part of a stable path are used more predominantly compared to the other nodes in the network. In this chapter, we discuss a new MANET routing protocol called “Location Prediction Based Routing” (LPBR) protocol (Meghanathan, 2009a) that simultaneously minimizes the number of route discoveries as well as the hop count of paths used for a source-destination session. We assume all the nodes are position-aware using techniques like Global Positioning Systems (Hofmann-Wellenhof, 2004) and the clocks across all nodes are synchronized.