Vector Switching Scheme (VSS) for Source Routing Protocol of MANET

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a group of mobile nodes which cooperate in forwarding packets in a multi-hop fashion without any centralized administration. One of its key challenges is routing. Many routing protocols for MANETs have been proposed and the protocols can be classified as proactive routing and on demand routing protocols. The later protocols without periodic routing updates scale better. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is a popular on demand protocol of MANET. It uses explicit “source routing” in data packet header to lead packet to destination. This allows other nodes forwarding any of these packets to cache this routing information easily for future use. However, this protocol has a high overhead of packet header. In this paper, we present a new packet forwarding scheme, Vector Switching Scheme which employs Vector Address (VA) to replace source route in packets, for source routing. The proposed scheme reduces overhead of packet header in source routing and enhances packet transfer performance.