On an Ad Hoc Routing Protocol using Directional Antennas

Directional antennas have great potential such as high spatial reuse and range extension. To fully exploit the benefits of directional antennas in ad hoc networks, efficient routing protocols as well as MAC schemes are to be considered. This paper proposes Load-Aware Directional Routing (LADR) to establish routes with fewer loads. Each node maintains current load information for each beam. In LADR, a route request packet is sequentially transmitted from the beam with few loads to establish a fewer loads route. LADR realizes load balancing without additional control overhead. Simulation results show that LADR outperforms DDSR and DSR in terms of the packet delivery ratio, throughput, and end-to-end delay, especially when the sending rate is high and the number of the sessions is large.