GRID: A Fully Location-Aware Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is one consisting of a set of mobile hosts capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of base stations. One prospective direction to assist routing in such an environment is to use location information provided by positioning devices such as global positioning systems (GPS). In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol called GRID, which tries to exploit location information in route discovery, packet relay, and route maintenance. Existing protocols, as compared to ours, are either not location-aware or partially location-aware in that location knowledge is not fully exploited in all these three aspects. One attractive feature of our protocol is its strong route maintenance capability – the intermediate hosts of a route can perform a handoff operation similar to that in cellular systems when it roams away to keep a route alive. This makes routes in the MANET more stable and insensitive to host mobility. Simulation results show that our GRID routing protocol can reduce the probability of route breakage, reduce the number of route discovery packets used, and lengthen routes' lifetime.