Direction based routing strategy to reduce broadcast storm in MANET

Abstract

In a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), mobile nodes may rapid change their positions and thus not only change the network topology but also may cause routing path disconnections frequently. Those routing protocols of on-demand would use flooding to broadcast RREQ (Route Request) messages to establish transmission route. However, flooding may cause broadcast storm and impair network performance severely. In this paper we propose a Directive Location-Aided Routing (DLAR) protocol that selects intermediate nodes based on the moving direction of the source node. The protocol design criteria are to keep the network disconnections as close to the destination node as possible and limit the scope of RREQ broadcast area to prevent broadcast storm. In addition, DLAR also employs ADOV as route discovery mechanism for LAR (Location-Aided Routing) and uses local repair mechanism to initiate route discovery at the local disconnected position in order to speed up route discovery process. We use NS-2 as network simulator to compare the performance of the proposed DLAR to that of the AODV, DSR and LAR in terms of packet delivery ratio, RREQ packet volume, end-to-end delay, average number of hops against node distribution density, node velocity, and number of node connections.