ABRP: Anchor-based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks, which do not rely on any infrastructure such as access points or base stations, can be deployed rapidly and inexpensively even in situations with geographical or time constraints. Ad hoc networks are attractive in both military and disaster situations and also in commercial uses like sensor networks or conferencing. In ad hoc networks, each node acts both as a router and as a host. The topology of an ad hoc network may change dynamically, which makes it difficult to design an efficient routing protocol. As more and more wireless devices connect to the network, it is important to design a scalable routing protocol for ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present Anchor-based Routing Protocol (ABRP), a scalable routing protocol for ad hoc networks. It is a hybrid routing protocol, which combines the table-based routing strategy with the geographic routing strategy. However, GPS (Global Positioning System) (Kaplan, Understanding GPS principles and Applications, Boston: Artech House publishers, 1996) support is not needed. ABRP consists of a location-based clustering protocol, an intra-cell routing protocol and an inter-cell routing protocol. The location-based clustering protocol divides the network region into different cells. The intra-cell routing protocol routes packets within one cell. The inter-cell routing protocol is used to route packets between nodes in different cells. The combination of intra-cell and inter-cell routing protocol makes ABRP highly scalable, since each node needs to only maintain routes within a cell. The inter-cell routing protocol establishes multiple routes between different cells, which makes ABRP reliable and efficient. We evaluate the performance of ABRP using ns2 simulator. We simulated different size of networks from 200 nodes to 1600 nodes. Simulation results show that ABRP is efficient and scales well to large networks. ABRP combines the advantages of multi-path routing strategy and geographic routing strategy—efficiency and scalability, and avoids the burden—GPS support.