A bidirectional symmetric routing protocol for MANETs with unidirectional links

In real-world Ad hoc networks, nodes have heterogeneity which is reflected in unidirectional and asymmetric links. Unidirectional links often lead to establishing route difficultly, long route path construction time, routing handoff frequently and randomly etc al. The performance of Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol based on symmetrical and bidirectional routing path is severely affected once it operates in the real-world heterogeneous network. We discuss the challenges for AODV and focus on the problem of how to establish bidirectional path. In this paper, we propose the Bidirectional Symmetric Routing (BSR) scheme that effectively improves the stability of the routing. Meanwhile, Two-hop Bidirectional Route (TBR) technique is introduced to expand the scope of the local connectivity and reduce the response time. We deploy an actual indoor scene to verify the BSR compared with AODV. The practical test results demonstrate that our mechanisms have greater improvement than AODV with higher throughput, shorter latency and lower packet loss.