NARD: Neighbor-assisted route discovery in MANETs

Reactive routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks usually discover routes by disseminating control packets across the entire network; this technique is known as brute-force flooding. This paper presents NARD, which stands for neighbor-assisted route discovery protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. In NARD, a source node floods a limited portion of the network searching not only for the destination node, but also for routing information related to other nodes (called destination-neighbors) that were near the destination node recently. Destination-neighbors can be used as anchor points where a second limited flooding takes place in search for the destination node. Because only two limited portions of the network are flooded by control packets near the source and destination nodes, NARD can significantly reduce signaling overhead due to route-discovery compared with other proposals. Simulations with NS-2 were carried out to verify the validity of our approach.