A Performance Comparison Study of the Location Prediction Based Routing Protocol with Position Based Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In a recent work, we published the Location Prediction Based Routing (LPBR) protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). LPBR is the first such beaconless MANET protocol to simultaneously minimize the hop count of the paths as well as the routing control overhead measured in terms of the number of control messages received during an on-demand broadcast discovery. LPBR works as follows: If the minimum hop route discovered through a regular broadcast route discovery fails, instead of the source immediately launching another broadcast route discovery, the destination attempts to locally predict the global network topology based on the location and mobility information of the nodes learnt during the most recent broadcast route discovery. If the predicted path does exist in reality, the source learns the path from the destination and continues to send data packets without launching a new broadcast route discovery. The performance of LPBR has been so far studied mainly with the topology-based routing protocols that initiate on-demand route discoveries. In this paper, we compare the performance of LPBR with position-based routing protocols in which the forwarding decisions are taken independently for each data packet at every forwarding node, depending on the estimated location of the destination. Through extensive simulations, we illustrate that LPBR performs significantly better compared to the well-known position-based routing protocols and their variants with respect to several performance metrics under diverse conditions of node mobility, network density and offered traffic load.