Using directionality in mobile routing

The increased usage of directional methods of communications has prompted research into leveraging directionality in every layer of the network stack. In this paper, we explore the use of directionality in layer 3 to facilitate routing in highly mobile environments. We introduce Mobile Orthogonal Rendezvous Routing Protocol (MORRP) for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). MORRP is a lightweight, but scalable routing protocol utilizing directional communications (such as directional antennas or free-space-optical transceivers) to relax information requirements such as coordinate space embedding, node localization, and mobility. This relaxation is done by introducing a novel concept called the directional routing table (DRT) which maps a set-of-IDs to each interface direction to provide probabilistic routing information based on interface direction. We show that MORRP achieves connectivity with high probability even in highly mobile environments while maintaining only probabilistic information about destinations. Additionally, we compare MORRP with various proactive, reactive, and position-based routing protocols using single omni-directional interfaces and multiple directional interfaces and show that MORRP gains over 10–14 × additional goodput vs. traditional protocols and 15–20% additional goodput vs. traditional protocols using multiple interfaces. MORRP scales well without imposing DHT-like graph structures (eg: trees, rings, torus etc). We also show that high connectivity can be achieved without the need to frequently disseminate node position resulting increased scalability even in highly mobile environments.