Design and evaluation of a region-based ad hoc routing protocol

Most wireless ad hoc routing protocols incline to blindly flood route request packets to discover the optimal routes between source-destination pairs. This network-wide flooding not only wears out precious resources of wireless devices, but also interferes with normal data traffic. Several efficient broadcasting algorithms have been proposed to suppress redundant packet relays. However, they often suppress the detection of optimal routes too. To reduce route discovery overhead and at the same time ensure route optimality, we propose a REGion-based Routing (REGR) protocol, which dynamically creates a pre-routing region between each source-destination pair and limits the propagation of route request packets only within this region. In new route creation cases, REGR utilizes the efficient broadcast schemes to locate proper pre-routing regions that directly connect sources and destinations. In route update cases, pre-routing regions are simply built around old problematic routes. Both performance analyses and simulation results demonstrate the desired efficiency of REGR.