A cross-layer approach for designing directional routing protocol in MANETs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a directional routing protocol (DRP) for MANETs. DRP is an on-demand directional routing protocol which assumes a cross layer interaction between routing and MAC layer. The main features of DRP include an efficient route discovery mechanism, establishment and maintenance of directional routing and directional neighbor tables (DRT and DNT, respectively), and novel directional route recovery mechanisms. We have implemented DRP on top of an existing MAC protocol for directional antennas and have compared its performance with the popular dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol over both omni-directional and directional antenna models. Preliminary, simulation results are found to be very promising.