An interest-driven approach for unicast routing in MANETs with labeled paths and proactive path maintenance

We present the Ordered Proactive Enclave-based Routing for Ad-hoc networks (OPERA) protocol for unicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). OPERA uses source and destination labels to define elliptical interest-driven enclaves to reduce control overhead. A topological sort of destination labels is used for loop freedom. The use of label spacing allows effective local repairs. Simulation results comparing OPERA with traditional routing schemes such as AODV and OLSR show that it has a better delivery ratio and smaller delay in realistic load situations. The network load with OPERA is much smaller than with the traditional on-demand and proactive routing schemes.