Reliability-aware geocast for mobile ad hoc networks

We present a geocast protocol for mobile ad hoc networks that selects the most statistically reliable path towards the geocast region. The novel aspect of our protocol is the attribution of network layer reliability to space, which enables reliability-aware geocast and provides soft delay guarantees. The proposed approach focuses on route reliability as the end-to-end metric and constructs a map of local reliabilities on the deployment region. We show that the end-to-end reliability of a geographic route is written as a product of the local reliability estimates along the path from the source to the destination. The geocast protocol of this paper exploits this characteristic and discovers geographic routes that pass through the most statistically reliable regions. We evaluate the performance of the geocast protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and delay, and quantify the effect of node density, velocity, and traffic load on these performance metrics. The simulation results indicate that a high packet delivery rate and an acceptable latency are achieved for a wide range of node densities and velocities.