On reducing routing overhead and redundancy in mobile ad hoc networks

The majority of the routing protocols designed to date for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) rely on flooding of route requests for the establishment of routes on demand. A novel approach called CBORCA (Cut-Based On-demand Routing with Coordinate Awareness) is introduced. CBORCA improves the efficiency with which route requests are disseminated by partitioning the designated route forwarders in distinct quadrants and by selecting at most one "pivot" within each quadrant. Each new pivot is required to pass a distance test before joining the pivot set. Message complexity at each hop is shown to be (O(C) ≍ O(l). Experimental results using simulations demonstrate that the performance of CBORCA achieves better results than ORCA (On-demand Routing with Coordinate Awareness) in packet-delivery ratio, signaling overhead, and end-to-end delay.