A reliable multi-grid routing protocol for tactical MANETs

We propose a reliable multi-grid based routing protocol with the purpose of attaining high percentage of data delivery in the tactical mobile ad hoc networks. In grid-based protocols, deployment region is divided into small patches called 'cells,' which are the units of routing. Our routing protocol for tactical MANETs employs multi-grid routing scheme adaptively uses varying cell sizes, unlike single-grid based protocols. In a dense network, a small-cell grid is employed to serve more alternative cells for a path. Meanwhile, a large-cell can be used to allow the probability of seamless data forwarding when the network is sparse. Moreover, we propose two reliability metrics for the grid-based protocol based on packet delivery rate between the cells and the status of the mobile nodes that enables relay node selection in the cell for forwarding data. The results from the performance evaluation in network simulator ( ns-2.33 ) shows that our scheme shows high reliability over 90% of data delivery ratio, low-latency and better overhead compared to the existing routing protocols.