A connectionless approach to mobile ad hoc networks

Today's communication techniques for mobile ad hoc networks take a connection-oriented approach. Mobile nodes need to discover routes and establish a connection before they can communicate. This strategy is not robust as it cannot adapt to frequent unpredictable topology changes due to high mobility. Constant reconnections incur significant overhead making these schemes unsuitable for applications such as voice and video. To address these issues, we explore a connectionless paradigm in this paper. We leverage technology such as GPS (Global Positioning System) to allow a source node to discover a grid path to the destination node. Data packets are relayed along this path toward the destination using different intermediate nodes at different times without having to first establish connections between them. The performance of this new solution is essentially unaffected by node mobility. As a result, it is suitable for a wide range of mobile applications.