© Journal of Mathematics and Technology, ISSN: 2078-0257, No.3, August, 2010 75 AN EFFICIENT PACKET FORWARDING IN MANET WITH AODV USING RANDOM WAY POINT MOBILITY MODEL A. Kowshika 1 , C. Maheswari 2 , Dr. S.Karthik 3 1 Final Year M.E-CSE, 2 First Year M.E-CSE, 3 Professor & Head, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SNS College of Technology, Tamil Nadu (INDIA) E-mails: shika2906@gmail.com, mahes.technical@gmail.com, kkarthikraja@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Discovering and maintaining routes between nodes are one of the biggest challenges in MANETs the ultimate goal of the MANET community is to provide a set of standardized protocols that can be both robust and scalable. This paper proposes routing protocols based on the heading direction angle + Number of Hops, Number of Hops + heading direction angle, the best heading direction angle route. The first one is designed to calculate the angle direction and when the angles are the same take the best hop count. The second one is designed to calculate the best hop count and when the hops counts are the same take the best angle direction. The last one is designed to calculate the average of all heading direction angles in the route and find the best route from the source to the destination. We measure the performance of the proposed approach by comparing it with the well known On-Demand (reactive) routing protocol (AODV). Key words: Routing Protocol on Demand Routing, Hop Count, Direction Angle, MANET, AODV 1. INTRODUCTION A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile nodes connected by wireless links, to form an arbitrary topology. The nodes are free to move randomly [11]. Thus the network's wireless topology may be unpredictable and may change rapidly. Minimal configuration, quick deployment and absence of a central governing authority make ad hoc networks suitable for emergency situations like natural disasters, military conflicts, emergency medical situations etc. Widely varying mobility characteristics are expected to have a significant impact on the performance of the routing protocols [2]. The overall performance of any wireless protocol depends on the duration of interconnections between any two nodes transferring data as well on the duration of interconnections between nodes of a data path containing n-nodes. The main problem with Ad Hoc Networking is how to send a message from one node to another with no direct link. The nodes in the network are moving around unpredictably, and it is very challenging which nodes that are directly linked together. The topology of an Ad hoc network is constantly changing and it is very difficult for routing process [1][6]. Different protocols are specialized in different aspects of routing. The mobility of the nodes affects the number of average connected paths, which in turn affect the performance of the routing algorithm. With very sparsely populated network the number of possible connection between any two nodes is very less and hence the performance is poor [7]. It is expected that if the node density is increased the throughput of the network shall increase, but beyond a certain level if density is increased the performance degrades in some protocol. 1.1. Routing and types of routing protocols in MANET In order to enable communication within a MANET, a routing protocol is required to establish routes between participating nodes. Because of limited transmission range, multiple network hops may be needed to enable data communication between two nodes in the network. Since MANET is an infrastructure less network, each mobile node operates not only as a host but also as a router, forwarding packets for other mobile nodes in the network. There are frequent unpredictable topological changes in these networks, which makes the task of finding and maintaining routes as difficult. Conventional routing protocols based on distance vector or link state algorithms cannot be applied here, since the amount of routing related traffic would waste a large portion of the wireless bandwidth[2][10], and such discovered routes would soon become obsolete due to mobility of Nodes. In MANETs mobile nodes share the same frequency channel thereby limiting the network capacity. Thus one of the highly desirable properties of a routing protocol for MANETs is that it should be bandwidth efficient. Many protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols can be divided into three categories: proactive or table- driven, reactive or on-demand. 1.1.1. Proactive or table-driven protocols Table-driven protocols are one of the old ways of acquiring routing in mobile ad-hoc networks. These protocols maintain consistent overview of the network. Each node uses routing tables to store the location information of other nodes in the network. This information is used to transfer data among various nodes of the network. The freshness of the routing tables is ensured with these protocols that adopts different sorts of