KDSR: An Efficient DHT-Based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Peer to Peer (P2P) as well as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) follows the same idea of creating a network without the help of central entities. Both networks are faced with the same fundamental challenge - routing. Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) have recently proven to be a novel and efficient way for locating objects. Routing protocols of MANETs can potentially benefit from the combination with DHTs. In this paper, we propose Kademlia-based Dynamic Source Routing (KDSR), which integrates the functionality of a DHT and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) at the network layer to provide an efficient indirect routing primitive in MANETs. KDSR organizes mobile nodes into a XOR-based metric topology. This topology has the property that every message exchanged conveys useful routing information, which facilitates route discovery and route maintenance. Simulation results show that KDSR achieves better packet delivery ratios at significantly lower overhead than DSR.