Efficient DSR route request flooding with directional antennas

In this paper, an efficient scheme for flooding the DSR route request in ad hoc networks using directional antennas is proposed. The scheme makes use of the local neighbor information provided by the neighbor discovery scheme. Route request packets are forwarded to selected representative neighbors using directional transmissions instead of being broadcast to all neighbors. Two strategies are proposed to efficiently select the representative neighbors: fixed branching and honeycomb strategies. The fixed branching strategy selects one representative neighbor in each predefined forwarding direction, while the honeycomb strategy selects representative neighbors to create a hexagonal tiling pattern. Simulation results show that the proposed strategies are able to achieve a high route discovery success rate while keeping the number of involved nodes and the number of transmissions low.