A study on routing protocol suitable for directional links

Ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol has been investigated for mobile ad hoc networks and more commonly used. However, if there are unidirectional links in the networks, significantly long latency may be required for a route establishment when AODV routing protocol is used. We assume that unidirectional links can be occurred due to a difference of transmission power between the communicating nodes. Bidirectional routing abstraction (BRA) has been proposed to solve the problem of unidirectional link by using multi-hop broadcast technique. In addition, BRA has a potential to reduce the latency of route establishment in asymmetric networks. However multi-hop broadcast technique leads to an redundant power consumption. This paper proposes a routing protocol, which is AODV with cooperative relaying technique (CR-AODV). The cooperative relaying technique can extend the coverage and solve the problem of unidirectional links with less power consumption and less latency compared with BRA. By computer simulations, we show that our proposed method can reduce power consumption compared to BRA in a route establishment.