Comparing AODV and N-AODV Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are wireless networks designed for communications among nomadic hosts in absence of fixed infrastructure. Different reactive protocols for MANETs, in which routes are established only when needed, provide different network topology awareness (NTA) to each host, depending on their algorithmic features. NACK-based AODV (N-AODV) is a variant of the well-known Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) reactive protocol for MANETs we proposed with the aim of improving NTA of the original protocol. In this paper, a performance comparison between AODV and N-AODV is conducted in order to investigate whether N-AODV effectively improves NTA with respect to AODV, and how this improvement affects both its effectiveness and efficiency. The experiment is executed within a simulation environment. The obtained results show that a MANET adopting N-AODV exploits higher NTA than a MANET adopting AODV. Moreover, the improved awareness impacts effectiveness and efficiency of routing activities because, in the long-run, it results in a lower need to activate the route discovery process for establishing new communications sessions.