Direction oriented forwarding through minimum number of edge nodes (DOF-MEN) protocol for MANETs

Several routing protocols have already been proposed for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). This paper suggests an approach to select minimum number of edge nodes for forwarding the data. In this paper, we introduce a Direction Oriented Forwarding Through Minimum number of Edge Nodes (DOF-MEN) Protocol for MANET. It is based on Location Aided Routing (LAR) and Energy Efficient Location Aided Routing (EELAR) Protocol. It overcomes the disadvantages of the above mentioned routing approaches. It selects only one edge node as next hop, and sends data to that node alone. It completely reduces the routing overhead. Location-Aided Routing (LAR) protocol limits the searching of the new route within the smaller “request zone” of the ad hoc network. This results in a significant reduction in the number of routing messages. LAR defines a portion of the network for forwarding the routing message. With limited flooding, it reduces the total number of routing control packets traveling through the network during the route discovery process. In EELAR (Energy Efficient Location Aided Routing) a reference wireless base station is used for route discovery, instead of flooding control packets to the whole network area. The control packets are flooded to only the sub-area of the destination mobile node. The base station stores locations of the mobile nodes in a position table. Here the workload of the base station is increased.