Evaluation of Precursor Feature in a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Routing Protocol

Abstract

The ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) is a routing protocol that is usually used in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and other wireless ad hoc networks. The AODV is a reactive protocol, so a source node will use control messages to find routes to a destination node whenever there are data packets that are needed to transmit. If there is more than one route to the destination node, the source node chooses the shortest route (the route has the fewest number of hops). However, this selection is not ideal in some cases. Considering there is a defective node or unavailable node in the shortest route, the path from the source node to the destination node becomes unstable. To avoid this problem, an enhancement of the AODV is proposed. The proposed solution uses another metric besides the number of hops to find an optimized route. The new metric is the length of the precursor lists of involved nodes. The precursors of a node are the neighbor nodes that use this node as the next hop to a particular destination. The nodes that have a high number of neighbor nodes in their precursor lists are relatively more active than other nodes, and they seem to be located in the center of the network. Therefore, if they are out of commission, the network will suffer a heavy failure. The proposed solution mitigates the reliance of the network on these nodes, so the performance of the network can be optimized. In this paper, the performance of the proposed solution was evaluated using the NS-3 simulator, and the results show that the performance of the network had been improved with the proposed solution.