A location routing protocol based on smart antennas for ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are a type of mobile networks that function without any fixed infrastructure. One of the weaknesses of ad hoc networks is that route between a source and a destination is likely to break during communication. Location-based routing algorithms are promising in reducing routing overhead in ad hoc networks. Existing location-based routing algorithms employ the Global Positioning System (GPS) as their location information provider, and synchronize information network-wide. Nonetheless, these protocols have some limitations because the use of GPS is not realistic in certain circumstances. Since smart antenna is able to infer direction and ranging information between pairs of ad hoc node, the obtained local position information can be used to improve routing mechanism. This work proposes a novel Location-Enhanced On-Demand (LEOD) routing protocol which is based on smart antenna technique. The LEOD protocol utilizes local position instead of global position to discover routes and make routing decision for the ad hoc network. Theoretical computation and simulation results show that data packet loss rate decreased significantly compared to other methods well-documented in the literature. In addition, this protocol reduces the network control overheads and the power consumption. It also improves network average throughput.