Directional AODV Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

In most application scenarios, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are stationary or quasi-stationary with support of minimal mobility, in which most of their traffic is destined to the Internet through a gateway. Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is not appropriate for such WMNs, because flooding-based route discovery is both redundant and very expensive in terms of control message overhead. In this paper, we propose a directional AODV (D-AODV) routing protocol based on hop count to a gateway. In the route discovery to a gateway, D-AODV can reduce the number of broadcasting route request (RREQ) packets by using a restricted directional flooding technique. Simulation results showed that D-AODV could significantly reduce routing overhead by RREQ packets and enhance overall throughput performance.