Adapting connectionless approach to mobile ad hoc networks in obstacle environment

Most of today's communication techniques for mobile ad hoc networks take a connection-oriented approach. Mobile nodes need to discover routes and establish a connection before they can communicate. This strategy is not robust as it cannot adapt to frequent unpredictable topology changes due to high mobility. Constant reconnections incur significant overhead making these schemes unsuitable for applications such as voice and video. To address these issues, we explore a connectionless paradigm in this paper. We leverage technology such as GPS (Global Positioning System) to allow a source node to discover its general direction with respect to a destination node. Data packets are relayed along this directional path toward the destination using different intermediate nodes at different times without having to first establish a connection. Although an earlier work called connectionless approach (CLA) to mobile ad hoc network can work well in high mobility environment, it cannot be applied directly to obstacle environments because obstacle (i.e., mountains, lakes, or buildings) often block direct path between any two nodes. The contribution of this paper is to adapt CLA to obstacle environments. The proposed approach can relay data around obstacles, can quickly adapt to topology change, and can provide multiple communicating paths to the destination.