Reverse Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol in MANETs and Performance Comparison with AODV

Abstract

An ad hoc wireless network consists of a set of mobile nodes that are connected by wireless links. The network topology in such a network may keep changing randomly. Routing protocols that find a path to be followed by data packets from source node to a destination node used in traditional wired networks cannot be directly applied in ad hoc wireless networks due to their highly dynamic topology. A variety of routing protocols for ad hoc wireless networks has been proposed in the recent past. AODV (Ad-hoc on-demand Distance vector routing) is a representative among the most widely studied on-demand ad hoc routing protocols. In AODV, source node floods the route request packet in the network to obtain a route for the destination. AODV and most of the on demand ad hoc routing protocols use single route reply along reverse path. Route reply packet may not reach the source node due to rapid changes in topology or link failure resulting in reinitiating route discovery process. This increases communication delay, power consumption & decreases packet delivery ratio. To avoid these problems, the proposed routing protocol generates & maintains multiple route replies. The proposed (modified) AODV protocol is called Reverse AODV (R-AODV). In this paper, R-AODV protocol is implemented using NS-2.35 in Linux platform. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of RAODV and is compared with AODV using application oriented metrics, such as the throughput, packet delivery ratio and end to end delay. Simulation results show that RAODV performs well when link breakage is frequent.