DSR-Based Directional Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, a Dynamic Source Routing (DSR)- based directional routing protocol is invoked for wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas. This is designed to balance the trade-off between co-channel interferences from nodes hops away, and the total power consumed by all the nodes. Three metrics are considered in the route discovery process in order to select the best route: hop count, power budget and overlaps between adjacent beams. By exploiting the directionality of directional antennas, the proposed DSR-based directional routing protocol is capable of reducing the overlaps between beams of the nodes along the route, hence eliminating the interference. Arbitrary networks and random networks are considered in our simulations. The results show considerable performance gains for transmission of real-time traffic over ad hoc networks.