Design and Performance Analysis of a Geographic Routing Protocol for Highly Dynamic MANETs

Abstract

Efficient multi-hop routing has become important for airborne telemetry networks. The highly dynamic nature in these scenarios results in short-lived links. Geographic-based routing has an advantage over topology-based routing to make rapid forwarding decisions based on neighbor and destination position. The AeroRP geographic routing protocol is detailed, which uses a heuristic metric for forwarding decisions that takes transmission range and a neighbor's location and velocity into consideration. The main contributions of this work include detailing and finalizing the routing decision metrics, design, and simulation implementation of AeroRP. The analysis of the simulations shows AeroRP has several advantages over other MANET routing protocols and offers tradeoffs for different performance metrics in the form of different AeroRP modes. Specifically, AeroRP yields higher accuracy than all compared routing protocols and various AeroRP modes can be chosen depending on how packet delivery and delay are prioritized.