Performance Analysis of Enhanced AODV Protocols in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network Environment

The objective of this study is to enhance the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, a representative mobile ad hoc network environment routing protocol. In the existing AODV protocol, dynamic topology changes due to node mobility cause frequent route failures and network instability. We herein propose a local repair scheme to re-establish routes when links are broken and a dual-path routing scheme to improve network stability by employing alternate routes. After comparing the total data processing volumes, average packet end-to-end delays, numbers of connection pairs, energy consumptions, and numbers of generated packets of the enhanced AODV protocols, we discuss the optimal operating conditions for each scheme. We also investigated the performance variations resulting from changing the number of nodes and node mobility, using an NS-2 simulator. The results revealed that the dual-path protocol generally performs the best and improves the packet end-to-end delay by up to 45 %.