MRIRS: Mobile Ad Hoc Routing Assisted With Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) poses significant challenges such as route failure and end-to-end delay due to the decentralized nature of mobile ad hoc wireless networks, mobility of devices, and resource constraints. Motivated by this, in this work, a new routing protocol by implementing intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) in MANET, called MRIRS, is proposed. The developed MRIRS investigates the role of IRS as an intermediate node which helps not only for multi-flow multi-path routing even in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios but also supports delay minimization in the route discovery phase and helps with interference-avoiding channel assignment to the primary users (PUs). Comparison in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay (PD) averaged on 40 topologies based on the same source and destination pair with 3 flows shows that MRIRS has an 8% improvement in PDR and 800 msec improvement in PD. In environments with 8 m/s average node speed, MRIRS shows 114.88 kbps improvement in terms of throughput where 15.97% link failure is recorded on average. In environments with 16 m/s, link failure is around 24% where it is almost 98% for other routing protocols.

Automated summary

A new routing protocol, MRIRS, is proposed in this study to address challenges such as route failure and end-to-end delay in mobile ad hoc networks. By utilizing intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) as intermediate nodes, MRIRS enables multi-flow multi-path routing, minimizes delay during route discovery, and helps primary users avoid interference. The protocol shows improvements in packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and throughput compared to other routing protocols, especially in scenarios with higher node speeds.