PRDS: A priority based route discovery strategy for mobile Ad hoc networks

Abstract

Most reactive route discovery protocols in MANETs employ a random delay between rebroadcast route requests (RREQ) in order to avoid "broadcast storms". However this can lead to problems such as "next hop racing", and high redundancy in the rebroadcasting. In this paper we propose a Priority-based Route Discovery Strategy (PROS) to address both problems. PRDS assigns a high rebroadcast priority to "good" candidates to reduce next hop racing; and introduces a competing procedure to keep "bad" candidates from rebroadcast to alleviate "rebroadcast redundancy". PRDS is a general mechanism that can be applied to different reactive routing protocols to improve the routing performance. As an example, a macrobian route discovery strategy using PRDS (PRDS-MR) is introduced. Simulation results show that PRDS-MR outperforms AODV in terms of packet delivery ratio and delay while decreasing routing overhead up to 50%-80%. © Springer-Verlag 2004.