Multipath Routing Protocol to Support Dual Polarised Directional Communication for Performance Enhancement of MANETs

Routing is an essential part of data exchange in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). A protocol that can discover multiple routes from source to destination can support reliable routing of information in MANETs. However, a reliable routing protocol alone cannot enhance performance of MANETs. Nodes in MANETs also experience the problems of interference, exposed nodes and deafness. Hence a solution that can overcome these problems while offering reliable routing of information is essential. In this paper, Dual Polarized Directional Antenna based Multipath Routing Protocol (DPDA-MRP) is presented. With DPDA-MRP, the nodes participating in multihop communication are capable of carrying out dual polarised directional communication, which helps in mitigation of interference, exposed nodes, directional exposed nodes and deafness. The performance of the proposed DPDA-MRP protocol is compared with that of Single Polarised Directional Antenna based Multipath Routing Protocol(SPDA-MRP) and omnidirectional communication based Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Simulation results show that DPDA-MRP achieves highest throughput among the three multipath routing protocols.