A Location Prediction-Based Reactive Routing Protocol to Minimize the Number of Route Discoveries and Hop Count per Path in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a new mobile ad hoc network routing protocol called ‘location prediction-based routing’ (LPBR) to simultaneously minimize the number of route discoveries and hop count of the paths for a source–destination session. During a regular flooding-based route discovery, LPBR collects the location and mobility information of nodes in the network and stores the collected information at the destination node of the route search process. When the minimum hop route discovered through the flooding-based route discovery fails, the destination node attempts to predict the current location of each node using the location and mobility information collected during the latest flooding-based route discovery. A minimum hop Dijkstra algorithm is run on the locally predicted global topology. If the predicted minimum hop route exists in reality, no expensive flooding-based route discovery is needed and the source continues to send data packets on the discovered route; otherwise, the source initiates another flooding-based route discovery. Simulation results indicate that LPBR incurs a significantly reduced number of flooding-based route discoveries, lower hop count per path, smaller route discovery overhead, lower end-to-end delay per packet and higher packet delivery ratio compared with that of the minimum hop-based, stability-based and position-based routing protocols.