Abstract: Both node mobility and network congestion may lead to invalidation of RREP and failure of existing routes in ad hoc networks. Therefore the source node has to perform network-wide flooding again for rediscovering a new route, leading to an increase of the network load and consumption of a large amount of node energy and bandwidth. Based on route interception and MAC cache technique, a new On Demand Mesh Routing (ODMR) protocol is presented using the cross-layer concept. By spreading bypass RREP packets during route reply phase, the proposed protocol sets up multiple bypass routes to the destination in order to reduce route discovery frequency and improve protocol robustness. Simulation results show that ODMR can reduce the end-to-end delay with significantly less protocol overhead and higher network throughput as compared to AODV, AOMDV, and AODV-BR.

Key words:

mobile ad hoc networks, routing protocols, bypass route, flooding packet