On demand routing protocol to support unidirectional links in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a multihop wireless network formed by a collection of mobile nodes communicating through radio links characterized by the absence of any preexisting infrastructure. Many of the proposed routing algorithms for MANET assume that the given network is an undirected graph. For these routing algorithms to work in the presence of unidirectional links, some modifications were proposed. These modifications eliminate unidirectional links from the route computation procedure. As a result, the performance of many popular routing protocols degrades drastically in the presence of many unidirectional links. In our paper we propose a theoretical framework of a novel routing protocol called ORPUL (On demand Routing Protocol with Unidirectional Link support) for mobile ad hoc networks together with the changes needed to be accommodated in the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer protocol.