Routing with adaptive path and limited flooding for mobile ad hoc networks

In MANET, each mobile host can freely move around and the network topology is dynamically constructed. To send a datagram, a source host broadcasts a route discovery packet to the network. All neighboring nodes receiving this packet will rebroadcast this packet until it reaches the destination. It will have large flooding overhead, poor network performance and undesirable battery power consumption. To improve network performance, we designed a novel routing protocol called RAPLF (routing with adaptive path and limited flooding) for mobile ad hoc networks. Simulation results showed that our protocol has better performance especially in packet delivery rate and flooding overhead when compared to similar protocols.