LAAR: Long-Range Radio Assisted Ad-Hoc Routing in MANETs

This paper investigates the routing protocol in smart phone-based mobile Ad-Hoc networks. We introduce a new dual radio communication model, where a long-range, low cost, and low rate radio is integrated into smart phones to assist regular radio interfaces such as WiFi and Bluetooth. We propose to use the long-range radio to carry out small management data packets to improve the routing protocols. Specifically, we develop new schemes built on the long-range radio to improve the efficiency of the path establishment process in the existing on-demand Ad-Hoc routing protocols. We have prototyped our solution LAAR on Android phones and evaluated the performance with small scale experiments and large scale simulation implemented on NS2. The results show that LAAR significantly improve the performance in terms of the overhead and the number of messages transferred in the network.