Enhancing MANET Routing Efficiency by Multipoint Relaying and 2-hop Repair

Building proper routing protocols for a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a critical challenge. A desirable MANET routing protocol must consider not only the broadcast storm problem which comes from flooding route requests in route discovery but also the path repair problem which usually takes massive control packets to rebuild paths when damage occurs. To advance the performance of MANETs, this paper presents a new routing protocol which employs the concept of multipoint relaying and 2-hop repair (MR2R) to deal with the broadcast storm and path damage problems. The MR2R protocol is distinct from previous protocols in its ability to reach rapid damage detection and repair, decrease packet amounts and increase the repair chances. As the obtained simulation results exhibit, our new protocol can effectively discover paths and repair damaged routes at less bandwidth consumption (i.e., with reduced control packets), in contrast to other protocols.