GRB: Greedy Routing Protocol with Backtracking for Mobile Ad Hoc Network (Extended Version)

Routing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) have been extensively studied for more than fifteen years. Position-based routing protocols route packets towards the destination using greedy forwarding (i.e., an intermediate node forwards packets to a neighbor that is closer to the destination than itself). Different position-based protocols use different strategies to pick the neighbor to forward the packet. If a node has no neighbor that is closer to the destination than itself, greedy forwarding fails. In this case, we say there is void (no neighboring nodes) in the direction of the destination. Different position-based routing protocols use different methods for dealing with voids. In this paper, we use a simple backtracking technique to deal with voids and design a position-based routing protocol called “Greedy Routing Protocol with Backtracking (GRB)”. We compare the performance of our protocol with the well known Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) routing and the Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol as well as the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Our protocol needs much less routing-control packets than those needed by DSR, AODV, and GPSR. Simulation results also show that our protocol has a higher packet-delivery ratio, lower end-to-end delay, and less hop count on average than AODV.