Design and Performance Evaluation of MORA: a Movement-Based Routing Algorithm for Ad Hoc Networks

In an ad hoc environment with no wired communication infrastructure, mobile hosts necessarily operate as routers, in order to provide network connectivity. Since mobile ad hoc networks change their topology frequently and without prior notice, routing in such networks becomes a challenging task. To explicitly consider node movements, we present MORA, a movement-based routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks. The algorithm is completely distributed, since nodes need to communicate only with direct neighbors within their transmission range, and utilizes a specific metric, which exploits not only the position, but also the direction of movement of mobile hosts. Extensive simulations evaluating the proposed protocol and results of comparison with existing methods demonstrate that MORA can provide an efficient and robust routing strategy.