A Contact-based Hybrid Routing Strategy for Mobile Wireless Networks: Protocol Design and Applications

In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for MANETs called Contact-based Hybrid Routing (CHR) protocol where each node maintains potential routes to the nodes which it encountered. Only one route request message is forwarded along the potential route to the destination maintained by the source, and if a gap between two intermediate nodes is found on the potential route, it is filled by the potential routes maintained by the two nodes. Based on this idea, our goal is to reduce the number of route request messages by maintaining small amount of information at nodes. The experimental results in the RWP mobility and the disaster evacuation mobility have shown that CHR could reduce the number of messages while keeping reasonable reachability to the destinations.