A MODIFIED ROUTE DISCOVERY APPROACH FOR DYNAMIC SOURCE ROUTING (DSR) PROTOCOL IN MOBILE AD-HOC NETWORKS

Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETs) involved in many applications, whether commercial or military because of their characteristics that do not depend on the infrastructure as well as the freedom movement of their elements, but in return has caused this random mobility of the nodes many of the challenges, where the routing is considered one of these challenges. There are many types of routing protocols that operate within MANET networks, which responsible for finding paths between the source and destination nodes with the modernization of these paths which are constantly changing due to the dynamic topology of the network stemming from the constant random movement of the nodes. The DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) routing protocol algorithm is one of these routing protocols which consist of two main stages; route discovery and maintenance, where the route discovery algorithm operates based on blind flooding of request messages. blind flooding is considered as the most well known broadcasting mechanism, it is inefficient in terms of communication and resource utilization, which causing increasing the probability of collisions, repeating send several copies of the same message, as well as increasing the delay. Hence, a new mechanism in route discovery stage and in caching the routes in DSR algorithm according to the node's location in the network and the direction of the broadcast is proposed for better performance especially in terms of delay as well as redundant packets rate. The implementation of proposed algorithms showed positive results in terms of delay, overhead, and improve the performance of MANETs in general