Virtual-Force-Based Geometric Routing Protocol in MANETs

Routing is the foremost issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To guarantee delivery and improve performance, most position-based routing protocols, e.g., greedy-face-greedy (GFG), forward a message in greedy routing mode until the message is forwarded to a local minimum where greedy forwarding is impossible. They then switch to a less efficient mode known as face routing. Face routing requires the underlying network to be a planar graph which makes geometric routing only theoretically feasible. To remove this constraint, this paper tackles the local minimum problem with two new methods. First, we construct a virtual small-world network by adding virtual long links to the network to reduce the number of local minima. Second, we use the virtual force method to recover from local minima without relying on face routing. Combining these two methods, we propose a purely greedy routing protocol, the small-world iterative navigation greedy (SWING+) routing protocol. Simulations are conducted to evaluate SWING+ against existing geometric routing protocols. Simulation results show that SWING+ guarantees delivery, and that its performance is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art greedy other adaptive face routing (GOAFR+) routing protocol.