Dynamic reverse route for on-demand routing protocol in MANET

Route establishment in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is the key mechanism to a successful connection between a pair of source and destination nodes. An efficient routing protocol constructs routing path with minimal time, less routing overhead and capable of utilizing all possible link connectivity. In general, most on-demand MANET routing protocols operates over symmetrical and bidirectional routing path, which is infeasible due to the inherent heterogeneous properties of wireless devices. Simulation results show that the presence of unidirectional links on a network severely affect the performance of a routing protocol. In this paper, a robust protocol independent scheme is proposed, which enable immediate rediscovery of alternative route for a path blocked by a unidirectional link. The proposed scheme is efficient; route rediscovery is locally computed, which results in significant minimization of multiple route packets flooding. Nodes may exploit route information of immediate neighbors using the local reply broadcast technique, which then redirect the control packets around the unidirectional links, therefore maintaining the end-to-end bidirectional connection. The proposed scheme along with Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and AODV-Blacklist routing protocol is investigated over three types of mobility models. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is extremely reliable under poor network conditions and the route connectivity can be improved by as much as 75%.