On-demand routing with unidirectional link using path loss estimation technique

Most on-demand Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) routing schemes typically assume operation over symmetrical and bidirectional routing paths, both of which are not feasible due to the inherent heterogeneous properties of wireless devices. Radio links between a set of wireless devices may be asymmetrical and unidirectional as a result of factors such as high mobility, packet collisions due to interference and differences in terms of transmission power assigned to the devices. In this paper, an efficient routing scheme based on the path loss estimation technique is proposed. The proposed scheme effectively reduces the probability of selecting routing paths with unidirectional links by predicting the symmetrical properties of the link. In addition, nodes choose the link with the lowest path loss and estimate the received power in the reverse direction. As such, the number of unreliable links formed along the routing path can be minimized. The proposed scheme is compared against AODV-EUDA, AODV, and AODV-Blacklist, which provides support for unidirectional link detection and avoidance. Simulation results shows that the proposed scheme improves the number of packet transmitted by as much as 53%.