Vector address routing protocol for MANET

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a group of mobile nodes which cooperate in forwarding packets in a multi-hop fashion without any centralized administration. One of its key challenges is routing. Many routing protocols for MANET have been proposed and the protocols can be classified as proactive routing and on demand routing protocols. The later protocols without periodic routing updates scale better. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing (AODV) protocol are popular on demand protocol of MANET. DSR uses explicit ldquosource routingrdquo in data packet header to lead packet to destination. This allows other nodes forwarding any of these packets to cache this routing information easily for future use. However, this protocol has a high overhead of packet header. AODV has a low overhead of packet header, but it maintains an entry in each nodepsilas Route Table for each destination that increased burden of intermediate nodes. In this paper, we present a new protocol, Vector Address Routing (VAR) protocol which employs Vector Address (VA) and Route Table. The proposed protocol reduces overhead of packet header in source routing and inherits advantages of DSR and AODV.