A Multi-Hop MAC Forwarding Protocol for High-Speed Mobile Nodes

Conventional topology-based routing protocols such as AODV, DSR and ZRP are not suitable for highly mobile ad hoc network, where frequent route re-establishment may cause high end-to-end delay and packet loss. This paper presents a new ad hoc routing protocol called the multi-hop MAC forwarding protocol (MMFP). The MMFP avoids explicit path setup in order to reduce the control overhead associated with it, but instead uses the reachability information towards the destination at each hop. Next-hop nodes are determined on-the-fly by contention based on a priority value. The basic operations of the MMFP are conceptually similar to that of MAC bridges and position-based ad-hoc routing protocols. The MMFP is designed to be integrated with the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in order to achieve higher efficiency and accuracy in its time-critical operations. Simulation results show that the MMFP outperforms the AODV in a practical ad hoc network scenario in terms of both the end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.