Performance-Aware Greedy Forwarding for Heterogeneous Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The routing protocol plays an important role in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Recently, location-based routing protocols have gained traction, replacing the traditional reliance on network topology information. Furthermore, computational power and transmission speed advancements have facilitated the widespread adoption of high-performance mobile terminals. Consequently, MANETs currently encompass diverse devices, ranging from cutting-edge models to legacy ones. However, most existing routing protocols within MANETs operate under the assumption of homogeneous terminal performance. This inherent limitation has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the way these protocols perform in real-world scenarios characterized by heterogeneous processing performance across terminals. This study aims to address this heterogeneity problem by proposing an enhanced greedy forwarding protocol, one of the routing protocols that leverages terminal location information. Our proposed protocol incorporates terminal performance as a critical metric for next-hop node selection, explicitly accounting for the performance disparities among potential next hops. Computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed protocol effectively reduces average end-to-end delay by prioritizing high-performance terminals. These findings underscore the potential of performance-aware routing strategies in enhancing the efficacy of MANETs operating in heterogeneous environments.