Enhancing route request broadcasting protocols constitutes a substantial part of recent research in mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) routing. We suggest a novel approach to modify route request broadcast based on node caching. The intuition behind node caching is that the nodes involved in recent data packet forwarding have more reliable information about its neighbors and have better locations (e.g., on the intersection of several data routes) than other nodes. We cache nodes which are recently involved in data packet forwarding, and use only them to forward route requests. Stopping forwarding route requests from the other nodes considerably reduces routing overhead at the expense of possible destination missing. The suggested node caching techniques can be also viewed as a dynamic implementation of a connected dominating set (CDS). We overcome the known drawback of CDS - overuse of dominating (cached) nodes - by a new load-balancing scheme.

routing protocols, mobile ad hoc networks, Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector, routing load balancing, performance evaluation, node caching, energy efficiency