Performance of routing protocols in very large-scale mobile wireless ad hoc networks

As wireless devices become more and more popular, ad hoc networks grow in the number of nodes as well as the complexity of communication among the large number of nodes. However, due to the limitation of simulation technologies, it is either impossible or very hard to investigate the scalability of ad hoc routing protocols in very large-scale wireless networks. In this paper, a comprehensive simulation study is conducted of the performance of an on-demand routing protocol on a very large-scale, with as many as 50,000 nodes in the network. We address the scalability analysis based on various network sizes, traffic load, and mobility. The reasons for packet loss are analyzed and categorized at each layer. Based on the observations, we optimize the parameter selection and try to exhaust the scalability boundary of the on-demand routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks.