FSRS Routing Method for Energy Efficiency through the New Concept of Flooding Restriction in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

In MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks), there are two kinds of routing methods: proactive and reactive. Each has different characteristics and advantages. The latter generally employs the flooding technique to finding a routing path to the destination. However, flooding has big overheads caused by broadcasting RREQ packets to the entire network. Therefore, reducing this overhead is really needed to enable several network efficiencies. Previous studies introduced many approaches which are mainly concerned with the restriction of flooding. However, they usually configure the detailed routing path in the forward flooding procedure and ignore the factors causing the flooding overheads. In this paper, we propose the FSRS(First Search and Reverse Setting) routing protocol which is a new approach in flooding techniques and a new paradigm shift. FSRS is based on cluster topology and is composed of two main mechanisms: inter-cluster and intra-cluster flooding. Inter-cluster routing floods RREQ packets between cluster units and sets a cluster path. When the destination node receives the RREQ packet, it floods RREP packets to an intra-cluster destination which is a gateway to relay the RREP packet to a previous cluster. This is called intra-cluster routing. So to speak, a specific routing path configuration progresses in the RREP process through the reverse cluster path. Consequently, FSRS is a new kind of hybrid protocol well adapted to wireless ad-hoc networks. This suggests a basic wireless networking architecture to make a dynamic cluster topology in future work. In the simulation using NS-2, we compare it to several other protocols and verify that FSRS is a powerful protocol. In the result of the simulation, FSRS conserves energy by a maximum of 12% compared to HCR.