Biologically Inspired Route Acquisition Process For Aodv Protocol In Manet.

Abstract

Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one of the widely used protocols within the category of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Unlike the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol, AODV provides a mechanism to know newness of a route. Furthermore; AODV has the ability to know and remove outdated routes. However; its limitation to consider and use node level parameters and its failure to utilize alternative routes were motivations for this research. Our objective was to study network parameters that can be used in the best route selection process, propose a generalized form of node quality metric, and use the ant colony optimization algorithm to provide an alternative route. But, due to our limited timeframe we were forced to focus on addressing AODV’s limitation to utilize node level measurements when choosing the best route. For the sake of simplicity, we have measured a single nodelevel property, namely the remaining energy, during our implementation. The implementation was simulated using the Network Simulator 3.30 software. The performance of our proposed method was compared with AODV using metrics such as average end-to-end delay, average throughput, and average packet delivery ratio. Simulation results indicated that our method creates a higher average end-to-end delay between communicating pairs. However; it is the best mechanism to measure path quality using a collection of node level measurements. In more stressful situations, our method has a 1% advantage over AODV in-terms of average packet delivery ratio. The key finding from this research was that the tradition method of measuring path quality was not the best. Instead of using the summation of individual node measurements, it was found to be efficient when the product of individual values were used. The product method of measuring path quality was proved, mathematically and using simulation, to be better than the summation method.