AAODV Routing Protocol: The Impact of the Routing Metric on the Performance of Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, a new routing protocol, named Adaptive Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AAODV) is presented. AAODV is based on Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol. Unlike AODV, this protocol is able to establish routes using any of the routing metrics calculated per link, due to its ability to separate paths quality monitoring from routing. In the paper AAODV uses, but it is not limited to, the following per link calculated metrics: hop count, delay, jitter and Expected Transmission Count. We analyze their influence on the overall performance of the Wireless Mesh Network, considering the triplet: packet loss ratio, delay and jitter. The simulations are realized using ns-3 simulator on eight randomly generated topologies with different traffic patterns. The results obtained have shown that in case of random topologies none of the routing metrics used provides significantly better results than the other ones. In order to increase the network performance, the transition to a multi-path routing protocol based on traffic aware metrics may be necessary.