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.
We present Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR), a novel routing protocol for wireless datagram networks that uses the positions of routers and a packet's destination to make packet forwarding decisions. GPSR makes greedy forwarding decisions using only information about a router's immediate neighbors in the network topology. When a packet reaches a region where greedy forwarding is impossible, the algorithm recovers by routing around the perimeter of the region. By keeping state only about the local topology, GPSR scales better in per-router state than shortest-path and ad-hoc routing protocols as the number of network destinations increases. Under mobility's frequent topology changes, GPSR can use local topology information to find correct new routes quickly. We describe the GPSR protocol, and use extensive simulation of mobile wireless networks to compare its performance with that of Dynamic Source Routing. Our simulations demonstrate GPSR's scalability on densely deployed wireless networks.