ABSTRACT Ad hoc networks are characterized by wireless connectivity,continuous changing topology,distributed operation and ease of deployment.

Routing in Ad hoc networks is a challenge due to mobility and thus is a current area of research.In context of Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANET) we can say that Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is collection of multi-hop wireless mobile nodes that communicate with each other without centralized control or established infrastructure.The wireless links in this network are highly error prone and can go down frequently due to mobility of nodes, interference and less infrastructure.Considering the importance of reactive routing protocols, we have all protocols share similar on- demand behavior, but their internal mechanisms lead to significant difference in their performance of the protocols by various network load and mobility.In recent years, several routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks and prominent among them are DSR,AODV,TORA and RDMAR. This Project describes the Relative Distance Micro-discovery Ad Hoc Routing (RDMAR) protocol for use in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs).The protocol is highly adaptive,bandwidth-efficient and scaleable.A key concept in its design is that protocol reaction to link failures is typically localised to a very small region of the network near the change. This desirable behaviour is achieved through the use of a novel mechanism for route discovery,called Relative Distance Micro-discovery (RDM).The concept behind RDM is that a query flood can be localised by knowing the relative distance (RD) between two terminals.To accomplish this, every time a route search between the two terminals is triggered, an iterative algorithm calculates an estimate of their RD, given an average nodal mobility and information about the elapsed time since they last communicated and their previous RD.Based on the newly calculated RD, the query flood is then localised to a limited region of the network centred at the source node of the route discovery and with maximum propagation radius that equals to the estimated relative distance.This ability to localise query flooding into a limited area of the network serves to increase scalability and minimise routing overhead and overall network congestion.

INTRODUCTION
Proactive protocols: In this type of routing protocol, each node in a network maintains one or more routing tables which are updated regularly. Each node sends a broadcast message to the entire network if there is a change in the network topology. However, it incurs additional overhead cost due to maintaining up-to-date information and as a result; throughput of the network may be affected but it provides the actual information to the availability of the network. Distance vector (DV) protocol, Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) protocol, Wireless Routing protocol Fisheye State Routing (FSR) protocol are the examples of Proactive protocols. Reactive Protocols: In this type of routing protocol, each node in a network discovers or maintains a route based on-demand. It floods a control message by global broadcast during discovering a route and when route is discovered then bandwidth is used for data transmission. The main advantage is that this protocol needs less touting information but the disadvantages are that it produces huge control packets due to route discovery during topology changes which occurs frequently in MANETs and it incurs higher latency. The examples of this type of protocol are Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad-hoc On Demand Routing (AODV) and Associativity Based Routing (ABR) protocols. Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) Protocol: It is a classical routing protocol for MANETs that compromise the trade-off problems like large packet header in reactive source protocol and large messaging overhead due to periodic updates in proactive protocols. It uses a distributed approach i.e. it keeps track of the neighbor nodes only and it does not establish a series of paths to reach the destination. It also uses route discovery and route maintenance mechanism like DSR.

Route Discovery: A source node send a broadcast message to its neighboring nodes if no route is available for the desired destination containing source address, source sequence number, destination address, destination sequence number, broadcast ID and hop count. Two pointers such as forward pointer and backward pointer are used during route discovery. Forward pointers keep track of the intermediate nodes while message being forwarded to destination node. Eventually, when route request message reached the destination node, it then unicast the reply message to the source via the intermediate nodes and the backward pointer keeps track of the nodes. The major feature of AODV that distinguish it from DSR is the destination sequence number which is used to verify the up-to-date path to the destination. Route Maintenance: Three types of messages exchanged between source and destination such as route error message, hello message and time out message. Route error message ensures that this message will be broadcasted to all nodes because when a node observes a failed link, it will propagate this message to its upstream nodes towards source node only. Hello message ensures the forward and backward pointers from expiration. Time out message guarantees the deletion of link when there is no activity for a certain amount of time between source and the destination node. Main advantages are 1) it is an efficient algorithm for mobile ad-hoc networks and it is scalable 2) it takes short time for convergence and is a loop free protocol and 3) messaging overhead to announce the link failure is less compared DSR. The main disadvantage is that it needs huge bandwidth to keep maintain periodic hello message. After selecting the route between the source and the destination and during data transmission,if any node participating in the route moves, then the node that tries to send data will detect a link break.Then it tries to salvage the packet, that is,it searches in its cache to find an alternate route to reach the destination.If there is any route,then it will send data through that new route.Otherwise,it creates a Route Error packet and sends it to the source node to indicate the failure of thelink.When forwarding the route error packet,the intermediate nodes remove the cache entries corresponding to the node,which moved and then forward the packet.On receiving the error packet, the source node also removes the entries corresponding to the node and tries to find another route to the destination in its cache. 3

Route Reply in the Proposed AODV: After broadcasting the route request,the source node waits for reply some amount of time,before retransmitting the request again.Till that time,the data packets that are to be transmitted are stored in a buffer. Source starts collecting the request until the time expires.Then it checks the reply to find out any repeated next hop.If it is,select any one of the repeated next hop paths,otherwise select randomly from the collected route replies and use that route to transmit the data.After broadcasting the route request, the source node waits for reply some amount of time,before retransmitting the request again.Till that time,the data packets that are to be transmitted are stored in a buffer.Source starts collecting the request until the time expires.Then it checks the reply to find out any repeated next hop.If it is,select any one of the repeated next hop paths,otherwise select randomly from the collected route replies and use that route to transmit the data.After broadcasting the route request,the source node waits for reply some amount of time, before retransmitting the request again.Till that time,the data packets that are to be transmitted are stored in a buffer. Source starts collecting the request until the timeexpires. Then it checks the reply to find out any repeated next hop. If it is, select any one of the repeated next hop paths, otherwise select randomly from the collected route replies and use that route totransmit the data.

RELATIVE DISTANCE MICRO DISCOVERY AD-HOC ROUTING PROTOCOL : Brief Description : The Relative Distance Microdiscovery Ad Hoc Routing (RDMAR) protocol is used in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs).This protocol is highly adaptive, bandwidth-efficient and scalable.A key concept in its design is that protocol reaction to link failures is typically localized to a very small region of the network near the change. This desirable behavior is achieved through the use of a novel mechanism for route discovery, called Relative Distance Micro-discovery (RDM). The concept behind RDM is that a query flood can be localized by knowing the relative distance (RD) between two terminals.To accomplish this,every time a route search between the two terminals is triggered, an iterative algorithm calculates an estimate of their RD,given an average nodal mobility and information about the elapsed time since they last communicated and their previous RD.Based on the newly calculated RD,the query flood is then localized to a limited region of the network centered at the source node of the route discovery and with maximum propagation radius that equals to the estimated relative distance.This ability to localize query flooding into a limited area of the network serves to increase scalability and minimize routing overhead and overall network congestion.The Relative Distance Micro-discovery Ad hoc Routing (RDMAR) protocol is designed for operation in mobile ad hoc networks [MANET].In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), nodes are free to move around randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily; thus, the networks wireless topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. In many packetradio networks the packet radios do not have direct radio links to all other packet radios in the network and thus store-and- forward routing of the packets is required. Therefore, nodes are acting also as routers (also called Mobile 4

Routers) and dynamically establishing routing patterns among themselves to form an infrastructure-less network. Aggelou,Tafazolli Expires 13 March 2000 RDMAR is a source-initiated on-demand routing protocol and allows nodes to maintain routes to destinations that are in active communication.One distinguishing feature of RDMAR is its use of an optimized route discovery mechanism, called Relative Distance Micro-discovery (RDM). According to this mechanism, the routing protocol limits the range of route searching in order to save the cost of flooding a route request message into the entire wireless are.Thus, in contrast to pure flooding mechanism where a route query would reach every node that is reachable in the wireless network,in RDMAR a query is propagated only to a limited region of the network for the successful discovery of the destination terminal.This is achieved by estimating the relative distance between the source and destination of the route search,thus restricting the range of route discovery within an area centered at the source node of the route discovery and with maximum radius that equals to the estimated relative distance. Another feature of RDMAR is that the maintenance of active paths (i.e.,paths that carry active calls) is a distributed operation that exploits the spatial relationship of nodes when a failure along an active route occurs. Depending on the relative distance of the node that reports the failure from the calling and called nodes,two heuristics are considered: a) if its relative distance from the called node is smaller or equal to this from the calling node,then RDM is to be applied to localize the repair of the failed route on the region of the network where the failure occurs; otherwise,b)the node proceeds and informs the calling node about the failure to deliver the call through this path. RDMAR Terminology : Node - A device in the ad hoc network willing to participate in the routing protocol. Link - A communication facility or medium over which nodes can communicate at the link layer,such as an Ethernet (simple or bridged). A link is the layer immediately below IP. Packet - An IP header plus payload. Active Route - A routing table entry with an unexpired Lifetime and a finite metric. A routing table may contain entries that are not active.Only active entries can be used to forward data packets. Route Discovery -The mechanism in RDMAR where a node S discovers a route to some node D when one is needed. Route Maintenance The mechanism in RDMAR whereby a node is able to detect,while using a route, if the network topology has changed such that it can no longer use this route. Specification Language This protocol specification uses conventional capitalized keywords such as "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED","SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" which are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC]. Protocol Overview - In RDMAR,calls are routed between the stations of the network by using routing tables which are stored at each station of the network; each node is treated as a host as well as a store-and-forward node.Each routing table lists all available destinations, and the number of hops to each.Therefore, the routing table of each node is a column vector of maximum (N - 1) row entries,where N is the set of participating nodes in the network.Apart from the available destination addresses,additional information is maintained for each destination address D. This includes: the "Default Router" field that indicates the next hop node through which the current node can reach D, the "RD" field which shows an estimate of the relative distance (RD) (in hops) between the node and D, the "Time_Last_Update" (TLU) field that indicates the time elapsed since the node last received routing information for D, a "RT_Timeout" field which records the remaining amount of time before the route is considered invalid, and a "Route Flag" field which declares 5

whether the route to D is active. Each mobile node maintains two data structures, in addition to the routing table, wherein all routing and management information, learned during protocol operation,is kept; namely these are: the Data Retransmission Table and the Route Request Table.When a source node S wishes to send a data packet to some destination D, it first examines if it has a route to this destination. If so, it keeps a copy of the packet in its Data Re-transmission table and then proceeds and transmits the packet over its network interface to the next hop identified in its routing table. The Data Re-transmission Buffer, therefore, is a queue of data packets that are awaiting the receipt of an explicit acknowledgement from their destination.Each intermediate node (IN) upon reception of a data packet, first acknowledges (link-level acknowledgement) its correct reception to the previous hop, and forwards it to the next hop, if a path to destination is available. If an IN is unable to forward the packet, it starts the Route Maintenance Phase,On the other hand,if the source, S, of the data packet does not have a route to destination (either because S did not have previous information for the destination node, D, or because S had a valid route for D but the lifetime associated with this route expired and hence erased from its Routing Table),the node buffers the packet and attempts to discover one using the Route Discovery procedure. Packet Formats : Route Requests (RREQs),Route Replies (RREPs), and FN (Failure Notification) are the three message types defined by RDMAR. These messages carry all the control information needed for the correct operation of RDMAR.

Algorithm :
In RDMAR, calls are routed between the stations of the network by using routing tables which are stored at each station of the network; each node is treated as a host as well as a store-and-forward node. Each routing table lists all reachable destinations, wherein for each destination i, additional routing information is also maintained. This includes: the Default Router field that indicates the next hop node through which the current node can reach i, the RD field which shows an estimate of the relative distance (in hops) between the node and i, the Time_Last_Update (TLU) field that indicates the time since the node last received routing information for i, a RT_Timeout field which records the remaining amount of time before the route is considered invalid, and a Route Flag field which declares whether the route to i is active. RDMAR comprises of two main algorithms: Route Discovery - When an incoming call arrives at node i for destination node j and there is no route available,i initiates a route discovery phase. Here,i has two options;either to flood the network with a route query in which case the route query packets are broadcast into the whole network, or instead, to limit the discovery in a smaller region of the network, if some kind of location prediction model for j can be established.The former case is straightforward. In the latter case, the source of the route discovery, i, refers to its routing table in order to retrieve information on its previous relative distance with j and the time elapsed since i last received routing information for j. Let us designate this time as tmotion. Based on this information and assuming a moderate velocity, Micro_Velocity, and a moderate transmission range, Micro_Range, node i is then able to estimate its new relative distance to destination node j in terms of actual number of hops. To accomplish this, node i calculates the distance offset of DST (DST_Offset) during tmotion, and adjusts the result onto their previous relative distance (RDM_Radius). Route Maintenance - An intermediate node i, upon reception of a data packet,first processes the routing header and then forwards the packet to the next hop. In addition,node i sends an explicit message to examine whether a bi-directional link can be established with the previous node. RDMAR, therefore, does not assume bi-directional links but in contrast nodes exercise the possibility of having bi-directional links. In this way, nodes that forward a data packet will always have routing information to send the future acknowledgement back to the source. If node i is unable to forward the packet because there is no route available or a forwarding error occurs along the data path as a result of a link or node failure, i may attempt a number of additional retransmissions of the same data packet, up to a maximum number of retries.However, if the failure persists, node i initiates a Route Discovery procedure.