Directional Antenna Multi-path Location Aided Routing (DA-MLAR)

DA-MLAR is an extension of multi-path location aided routing (MLAR) with directional antenna capability. DA-MLAR minimizes the protocol overhead of reactive routing protocols. The extension not only further reduces MLAR´s protocol overhead, but also improves the packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay. This is because the long radio transmission range obtained using directional antenna can avoid network partitions so as to reduce the number of rebroadcasts and cut down on the number of routing hops. Through simulations, we demonstrate that MLAR with directional antenna reduces protocol overhead by up to 87%, data overhead by up to 40%, end- to-end delay by up to 33%, and improves packet delivery ratio by up to 15%. In most of the topologies, directionalities with beam width ranging from 9 to 15 degrees are found to be optimal most of the time