An efficient and scalable routing for MANETs

Recently, Distributed-Hash-Table (DHT)-based routing protocols have been proposed for large scale mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The motive behind using DHT is to avoid/reduce network wide flooding in MANETs in route discovery phase leading to achieve more scalable network. The challenge of deploying DHT at network layer for routing purpose in MANETs is to achieve more matching between logical and physical networks. The paper describes that existing DHT-based routing protocols for MANETs lack this feature. The paper presents a new DHT based scheme [called an efficient and scalable routing forMANETs (ESR)] which reduces the ill-matching between logical and physical networks. This is achieved be distributing the logical identifier (LID) space of DHT structure among the nodes such that the physical neighbors have consecutive LID space portions, i.e. all physical neighbors of a node are also the logical neighbors of the node. Therefore the logical ID space portion of a node may be non-contiguous. Based on this logical structure, a node builds up binary-search-tree (BST) using both logical ID space portion of itself and its neighbors. This BST at the node is traversed to find the next hop for a query/message. Through simulation, the paper shows the proposed approach (ESR) performs better than the existing one in term of routing overhead, average end-to-end delay, path-stretch values and false-negative ratio.