1 Abstract— Routing in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has been a subject of extensive research over the past several years. Quadrant-based directional routing protocol (Q-DIR) is a routing protocol where only nodes in the same quadrant as the destination will participate in the route discovery process. Q-DIR uses exact location of nodes based on Cartesian-coordinate system to determine the quadrant nodes are located with reference to the source and destination. Unlike other position-based routing protocols, Q-DIR only transmits route request to all nodes that are in the same quadrant as the source and destination instead of broadcasting in all direction and hence, reduces not only routing overhead in route discovery phase, but also wireless bandwidth used and flooding of packets in the network. This paper outlines the performance of a multi-hop Q-DIR in a real MANET test bed that integrate GPS-free self-positioning system with Q-AODVbis which have been developed recently as a Loadable Kernel Module in Linux environment. Index Terms—Location tracking, self-positioning system, geocast-enhanced AODVbis, Quadrant-based directional routing. I. INTRODUCTION Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a peer to peer wireless infrastructure-less network which may consists of a large number of mobile nodes such as PDAs and laptops. Since the nodes in a network can serve as routers and hosts, they can forward packets on behalf of other nodes and run user applications [1]. Various routing metrics usually used are shortest path, link stability and minimum number of hops towards the destination. But, recent routing metrics that have been extensively researched are power conservation and optimized bandwidth because mobile nodes in MANET are stand-alone devices and operate on batteries. Performance evaluation criteria usually used in these protocols are packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and nodes’ lifetime. In MANET, communication among nodes can be made and setup almost immediately especially in emergency and disaster operations, military battlefield and even in a building for security and surveillance [1-2]. Routing in MANET is a challenging task as the topology changes as node moves. Over the past several years, more than 50 MANET routing protocols have been proposed and can be categorized into topology-based [3] and position-based protocols [4]. In the former, on-demand or proactive flooding of route request (RREQ) are done at each node to detect routes and are generally considered to be not scalable. However, in position-based protocol (also called geometric or directional routing), routing is optimized by making use of geographical information available at each node. In LGF [5], a geocast-enhanced AODVbis, distance information at the nodes is used to determine nodes’ participation in the routing. The distance information of the all nodes in the network is provided by the work done in [6] or any location service entity [7]. This means that nodes will have to store distance information of itself to other nodes in the network and this will incur delay in route discovery where nodes need to decide to forward or drop the RREQ packet. This paper aims to reduce delay and also eliminate data storage at the nodes by using the coordinates of the node only. Q-DIR assumes that the coordinates of each node are known using self-positioning system [8] and modifies the AODVbis [9] to identify and enable nodes that are in the same quadrant as the source and destination to participate in the routing. Each node knows of its own coordinates and when routing packets to a certain destination, the coordinates of the destination are inserted in the route request packet (RREQ). Therefore, every node that receives this packet will use this information to determine its quadrant compared to source and destination. If it is in the same quadrant, then the node will rebroadcast the packet, otherwise, it will discard and cancel its scheduled rebroadcast of the packet. Nodes that forward the RREQ packet will then insert its coordinates in the source coordinates field so that at the next intermediate node the forwarding process will be more directed. With this method of decision making, only nodes that are in the same forwarding zone will participate in routing until the packet reaches the destination. With the path accumulation (PA) feature in AODVbis, these forward routes will be stored and used in the packet forwarding phase which will forward data packets to the destination via the routes discovered beforehand. Hence, routing overhead and flooding of packets will be reduced significantly. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 will present related work on self-positioning system and on- demand protocol. The implementation of 3 hops Q-DIR in a Network Performance of a Multi-hop Quadrant- based Directional Routing Protocol (Q-DIR) in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Network L.A.Latiff, A. Ali, Chia-Ching Ooi, N. Fisal, M.Ismail