Assessment of node density in Cartesian Ad hoc Routing Protocols (CARP)

With the rapid development in the geographical positioning system (GPS) technology, the geographical routing category of the MANET protocols has recently been a hot research area. The Cartesian Ad hoc Routing Protocols (CARP) are a set of three adaptive and connectionless protocols that address the problem of routing and power consumption in MANET. These protocols are used to limit the number of forwarding nodes in a logical transmission area. Density of an ad hoc network is considered a network parameter in CARP, and is used in the calculations to form a logical transmission area. The CARP assume that the nodes have some knowledge about the density from previous activity of the network, but no specific density determining mechanism has been described. This research paper presents a density determining mechanism for location aware nodes that use CARP. As the nodes are location aware, the location information is used as a key parameter to conduct a census of nodes. The nodes in a network with implementation of CARP can use this density value to form the logical broadcast area. As the nodes in MANET are potentially in motion, density may change over time. The proposed algorithm also tracks the density value over time and keeps it updated as per situation of the network. The simulation results in OPNET Modeler 10.5 validate the performance of this density determining algorithm for CARP.