Local Area Dynamic Routing Protocol: a Position Based Routing Protocol for MANET

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) comprises mobile nodes (MNs), equipped with wireless
communications devices; which form a temporary communication network without fixed
network infrastructure or topology.
The characteristics of MANET are: limited bandwidth; limited radio range; high mobility; and
vulnerability to attacks that degrade the signal to noise ratio and bit error rates. These
characteristics create challenges to MANET routing protocols. In addition, the mobility pattern
of the MNs also has major impact on the MANET routing protocols.
The issue of routing and maintaining packets between MNs in the mobile ad hoc networks
(MANETs) has always been a challenge; i.e. encountering broadcast storm under high node
density, geographically constrained broadcasting of a service discovery message and local
minimum problem under low node density. This requires an efficient design and development
of a lightweight routing algorithm which can be handled by those GPS equipped devices.
Most proposed location based routing protocols however, rely on a single route for each data
transmission. They also use a location based system to find the destination address of MNs
which over time, will not be accurate and may result in routing loop or routing failure.
Our proposed lightweight protocol, ‘Local Area Network Dynamic Routing’ (LANDY) uses a
localized routing technique which combines a unique locomotion prediction method and
velocity information of MNs to route packets. The protocol is capable of optimising routing
performance in advanced mobility scenarios, by reducing the control overhead and improving
the data packet delivery.
In addition, the approach of using locomotion prediction, has the advantage of fast and accurate
routing over other position based routing algorithms in mobile scenarios. Recovery with
LANDY is faster than other location protocols, which use mainly greedy algorithms, (such as
GPRS), no signalling or configuration of the intermediate nodes is required after a failure.
The key difference is that it allows sharing of locomotion and velocity information among the
nodes through locomotion table. The protocol is designed for applications in which we expect
that nodes will have access to a position service (e.g., future combat system). Simulation results
show that LANDY`s performance improves upon other position based routing protocols.