AODV enhancement based on the minimization of route-request packets

Abstract

A MANET is a self-configuring network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. Reactive Routing protocols for MANETs flood RREQ control packets to discover and establish route between the source-destination pairs. This situation becomes worse and degrades the network performance whenever several connections need to be established simultaneously. This paper proposes a mechanism to minimize the route-establishment overhead in AODV by controlling the flooding of RREQ packets. In brief, each intermediate node counts the number of RREQ packets flooded by it and if the count exceeds a threshold, stops further flooding. On the other hand, an intermediate node, after getting a RREP packet within reverse-route-lifetime reduces the counter value; otherwise the reverse link in its cache is removed along with the reduction of the counter value. The proposed scheme has been simulated using ns-2 and compared with the original AODV and it has been found that it enhances network performance. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.