NARD: Neighbor-Assisted Route Discovery in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks usually discover routes by flooding the entire network with control packets; this technique is known as blind flooding. This paper presents NARD, a neighbor-assisted route discovery protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. In NARD, a source node floods a limited portion of the network looking not only for the destination node, but also for routing information of other nodes (called neighbors) that were known to be near the destination node recently. Neighbor nodes can be used as anchor points where a second limited flooding takes place in search for the destination node. Because only a limited portion of the network is flooded by control packets near the source and destination nodes, NARD can significantly reduce the signaling overhead of route discovery compared with blind flooding techniques. Simulations with NS2 were undertaken to verify the validity of our approach.