Proposing an approach for routing overhead reduction in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks are characterized by multi-hop wireless links, absence of any cellular infrastructure, and frequent host mobility. Design of efficient routing protocols in such networks is a challenging issue. A class of routing protocols called on-demand protocols has recently found attention because of their low routing overhead. We propose a technique that can reduce the routing overhead even further. The on-demand protocols depend on query floods to discover routes whenever a new route is needed. Our approach reduces the number of broadcast packet and reduces the number of query packets in the networks to a limited region of the network to send query packets. Simulation results demonstrate excellent reduction of routing overheads with this mechanism. This also contributes to a reduced level of network congestion and better end-to-end delay performance of data packets.