A comparative analysis of AODV route recovery mechanisms in wireless Ad Hoc networks

This work investigates the behavior of the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol in situations of link failures due to the mobility of nodes and consequent route recovery in ad hoc networks. Here, the AODV performance is compared when the failure repair happens locally, at the node before the link break, to the case where the repair is started from the source node considering three performance metrics: packet delivey fraction, overhead and packet delivery delay. It was observed that for source repair the packet delivery fraction has better performance, while overhead and delay were better for local repair, in the sparse network and low traffic scenarios studied. For the denser network cases, it was observed that the source repair mechanism behaves better for overhead and delay metrics. These results are important to applications that tolerate few losses but are more restringent to delay and suggest that either one or another recovering mechanism may be used depending on the network parameters and user application information, instead of adopting a hybrid recovery implementation of both mechanisms based only on the number of hops between the link break and the destination as described in the AODV protocol Request for Comments (RFC).