Destination-Assisted Routing Enhancement (DARE) protocol for ad-hoc mobile networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Destination-Assisted Routing Enhancement (DARE) module as a generic add-on middleware to mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) routing protocols. The goal of DARE is to assist the routing protocol to establish a path between the source and destination quickly with high reachability probability by generating destination beacon packets, while considering the dynamic characteristic of MANET and the need for low routing control overhead. These beacon packets act like trail packets to aid in finding the destination. A simplified mathematical model as a proof of concept is presented. We prove that the probability of finding the path between the source and destination using DARE outperforms the same probability using the traditional routing technique. The simulation results show the potential of adding DARE middleware to DSR protocol; for an instance of on-demand ad-hoc routing protocols, to achieve higher network performance in terms of throughput, route discovery time, and connection setup probability. A route discovery time was reported to be 20% less than the original DSR in mobile ad-hoc nodes with minimum overhead.